:Title: Mindfulness :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 16:50:43 PDT :Modified: Sat, 24 May 2008 16:54:58 PDT :URL: http://www.ned.com/user/u523412994/news/31/ **DISCLAIMER** *This is rambling. This is thinking. Call it (at this point) individual brainstorming. I have posted this here because I want to work with each of you and share these ideas to build an organized vision and maybe lead to an insight in a positive forward direction. I speak of Buddhism not being a Buddhist but admiring much of what I see. I am not an expert.* I believe deep in my heart that every person on the globe wants to move their life forward toward something better. The problem is figuring out the direction. We wander. We look around us to see what others are doing and kind of figure the direction most people is going is the right direction. Some of us travel that path and find that it really isn't going anywhere that we want to go and screw up enough courage to try to swim upstream. I guess I feel like I have always been swimming upstream. I mean I gave my first doom and gloom speech on the environment to a large church group in 1966. (About the same time I was protesting the war in Vietnam.) I got into this mode of thinking by the constant comments when I speak about Sufficiency Economy here in Thailand (remember, this is a philosophy developed by the King of Thailand) that I must be crazy. How could I get into the Sufficiency Economy thing when I am an American? People in Thailand and much of the rest of the world, believe that the west (most visibly and audibly America) has the answers to happiness and well being. They don't have a clue. But why should I be surprised that Thais and Africans don't understand that the western goal of mindless consumerism and endless accumulation is not the answer when those who are living in the middle of that and know that it is not really the answer keep chasing it? When I came to first learn about Buddhist Economics, it grabbed me. Most simply stated it is economics where ethics matter. Where people are central. Where having a job is more than making money; it is honing a skill and having pride in your work and knowing that you are contributing to society with your work. It is an economics where the focus is not on the accumulation of wealth but rather a measure of how you distribute your wealth. One of the biggest problems with it is that it is still, in many ways, a regional, cultural concept that is fully shrouded in Buddhism. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with that. It is to say that it is my belief that as long as it wears that outer layer, not many people will look at the beauty inside it. I have more than once joked with Aj. Apichai that I thought I was called to take the Buddhism out of Buddhist Economics. I am just not sure how to do that so that it can speak to millions of people in the west who I believe are searching for the answers it points to. The hub in Buddhist Economics is the Buddhist concept of relieving suffering. Relieving suffering for oneself and for all those around us. The goals of the Buddhist Philosophy are to examine (in your own life) the causes of suffering. The central cause of suffering is identified as attachment. Attachment to things and people and ideas - attachment to anything - limits our satisfaction. Buddhism seems to be focused on awareness: self awareness, awareness of others and awareness of our actions and their effects....looking for causes. Mindfulness. It is a term that was focused into my vision last year when I went to the conference in Budapest. There was another conference participant, `Joel Magnuson`_ who is from Portland. He is an economist who teaches at Portland State University and Portland Community College. He has written a great textbook `"Mindful Economics"`_. .. _`"Mindful Economics"` : http://www.mindfuleconomics.com/ .. line-block:: mindfulness thinking about what you are doing thinking about why you are doing it thinking about what the effects of doing it are going to be Mindfulness.... It makes me think of all the times I would get in hot water with my mother and would land up saying "... but I didn't think it would matter" or "I didn't think you would care" and she would come back with "That is precisely the point: you didn't think." She used that phrase often. I hope she knows that now I at least try to think. .. _`Joel Magnuson` : http://www.ned.com/user/u638104174/ Your turn... ---- **Comments** :Author: Gayle Rogers :Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 19:55:59 PDT I have Yunus-induced brain-freeze - I'll be back later with thoughts. ---- :Author: Gayle Rogers :Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 19:59:08 PDT Oh yeah - **GREAT** question/topic/thread - Linda. And I love that you swim upstream **:)** ---- :Author: Liam Cullen :Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 01:31:00 PDT Hi Linda, I wonder how this approach to economics will endure with a new Thai Government stating to the world it is now very investment friendly and with cheap labour, large investors will be looking albeit with an eye to the political uncertainty? The only advice I can give for swimming upstream is to be careful when your mouth is open. cheers, Liam ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 01:59:27 PDT Liam...it's a good observation. I don't think there is a single aspect of Thai government that is not problematic for me. In terms of economics...the new gov't proposed 5 year plan declares that the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy is the basis of Thai development. And yet, it is not clear that anyone in the government outside of the King's Crown Property Bureau understands what Sufficiency Economy is. (Most of the people in that bureau don't either, I don't think.) The distribution of wealth n Thailand is very lopsided. (Pretty comparable with the US) Government in Thailand has always be structured so that those who are governing get rich. When they start getting too rich, there is a coup in order to share the wealth. (between the businessmen, technocrats and military) I don't think this view of wealth distribution is very Buddhist. It is very capitalist. It is very greed driven which is distinctly not Buddhist. Buddhist Economics is not the driving force behind Thai policy of any kind. Except where it is advantageous to appease the King (as in supporting the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy in some token way). That is not to say that any of it is bad. What is the old Christian maxim? "Only in their own towns and in their own homes are prophets without honor." It holds in Buddhist countries too. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 22:37:23 PDT Speaking of rambling posts--lol. I've been thinking about this one for a few days. Spring is excruciatingly beautiful I find. But I also spend days digging and it makes me tired, too tired to write--well sort of what I write doesn't seem to make much sense even to me. I'm looking over what I wrote last night and didn't post. There are several threads to it and links, but weaving all the threads together wasn't coming to me last night and isn't obvious to me now. So I'll just ramble a little tonight. My favorite story about mindfulness is `Three Questions`_ by Leo Tolstoy. Something I like about it is the action revolves around and emperor, and I like to imagine I am of some consequence and imagine most people do too. This is a story that Buddhist tell and yet there is no "outer layer" of Buddhism to distract others from the deeper meaning. In the West, teaching stories are not so commonly used as in other cultures, at least stories are told over and over so that a person hears them as a child, a young adult, adult and elder. Such stories don't lie flat on the page. I'm rather stuck of the notion of taking Buddhism out of Buddhist economics ;-) I do understand the problem of broader acceptance, and in a sense transmuting culturally embedded constructs into other cultures. But here's where I'm feeling a bit stuck on it: Something that has interested me quite a lot over time is why are theories in the behavioral or social sciences so poor? Economists seem to think that Economics is the most scientific of all the social sciences. A liability for me is that I'm not very good, or very knowledgeable about maths. I often find that economists seem so morally certain about positions which seem quite morally suspect to me and offer numbers to back them up. Is morality a sort of calculus? Well, something about Cartesian coordinates and working out problems with the Calculus, is the ability to simplify problems by ignoring some things and paying attention to others. I like Tolstoy's story because the important questions are about what to pay attention to and the answers have nothing to do with numbers. That said, I do like science very much. Science is a very good and important way of knowing, so I don't begrudge economists employing the scientific method. Teachers here in the West are want to say that education "is both an art and a science." Medical doctors say much the same, indeed many professions hold this balancing act as central to what they do. I rather wish that Economics did to. John Broome has an interesting article in this month's Scientific American, `The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later?`_. In it he argues that economists in trying to draw up plans about what to do about climate change cannot escape making ethical judgments. The problem as I see it is that Economics as the discipline exists today hasn't honed the skills needed to make ethical judgments. I think one of the reasons that Buddhist Economics jumped out at you is because you sense the deficit about economics as a discipline in this regard too, and Buddhist Economics perhaps provides a paradigm of better ways to imagine the study of Economics. I haven't used one link that I packed in yesterday's unposted reply to this thread yet. LOL, so you know I've got more rambling to do, but I'll save it for later. The simple point of this post is that the distraction of Buddhist Economics doesn't simply seem to me to be the Buddhist part. The other part is how Economics is envisioned as a discipline here in the West. The problem is more general to all the social or behavioral sciences. And the solution seems to me probably in dancing with both the art and science of things. .. _`Three Questions`: http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2736/ .. _`The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later?`: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-ethics-of-climate-change ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 04:00:37 PDT I am quite sure that the ethics issue is central to my interest. It is not verbotten to speak of ethics in a classroom here. It is rather, in fact, encouraged. In our International BBA program that I teach in, we have been working and changing things. The program will have its first graduates this year and over the last 3 years we have learned a lot in terms of the different things we need to do here to be able to do this kind of program. I guess about 6 months ago, I asked the Dean, If he had employers in front of him, how would he want to market our BBA graduates. He said that he would want to be able to say 5 things: 1) they were ethical, 2) they they were diligent, 3) had a reasonable command of English, 4)they had good, solid introductions to basic management skills and 5) they were computer literate. That sounded great and doable to me. Since that time we have added a year to the program to make the entire first year non-business fundamentals: English, ENGLISH and **MORE ENGLISH** plus problem solving skills, study skills, time management tools, computer skills etc. We have instituted a plagiarism policy that makes the program a cheat free zone: 1 infraction = 0, 2nd you are out of the program. Every course is required to have 20% of the mark for diligence - Do they do the reading? Do they do the homework? are they participating and asking questions? Are assignments on time? Attendance? Miss 20% of the classes and you fail the course. I have been doing some research on how to help them solve some of their learning deficiencies. I found a wonderful book on teaching math done by the National Science Foundation and free on the net! There is a great introduction about how people learn and metacognition skills. I have been talking today about how we can ground this program on core issues and those will likely be ethics related. Buddhist ethics are taught in schools here. It works mainly (I think) because Buddhist ethics are pretty acceptable to any religious tradition - don't kill, don't lie, cheat or steal, and make it your job to alleviate suffering in yourself and those around you. Imagine business managers who behaved like that!!!! Everything we do in life has an ethical factor whether we choose to recognize it or not or whether we call it that or something else. I have been quickly re-evaluating my Economics class in these terms (Classes start on Monday so I don't have much time!) I think it works and I am getting excited about teaching it. I think it gives them a central point to tie all of their studies together. I think it might help them learn the material easier. I hope... ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 22:46:07 PDT As if you have time to click on lots of links ;-) I put links in in case you might be interested not with the expectation of clicking. Your BBA program is a wonderful professional program. In the NY Times there's an `article`_ about a program at Binghampton University called the New Humanities Initiative. Basically it's an effort to combine the sciences and humanities. And your BBA program really achieves that sort of integration. Finding a way to make your PhD work meaningful to the broader discipline is a real challenge; at least here I'm still stuck on taking the Buddhism out of Buddhist Economics ;-) I enjoy reading Dani Rodrik's weblog. LOL much of what's on the Internet is too smart for me to really follow. Rodrik seems a natural blogger with short posts and a conversational style, unlike much of the economic blogging that available. Rodrik posted `Re-uniting development economics`_. He sees a consensus emerging among macro and micro development economists on policy, but a methodological divergence. So that problem isn't the same as the problem you're tackling of how to make Buddhist Economics a place at the larger table of the study of economics, but some of the outlines of the challenges seem similar. Anyway I found his attempt to get macro and micro economists to see that they have much in common nice. Obviously one of the big challenges for your work is to find a method that fits well with the discipline without--well--loosing the essential insights of Buddhist economics. Somewhere along the line you probably heard of the book `Pigs for the Ancestors`_. I'm really far afield here, but somehow how `Roy Rappaport`_ managed to merge his hard materialism with the a sympathetic study of people's beliefs seems very smart. Rappaport made a distinction "between how a people interpret their ecological niche and how their reality actually exists." He used the terms "cognized environment" and "operational environment." My probably unjustified "hit" on conventional Economics is that economist believe they are studying an objective operational environment, but, no, that environment is loaded with all sorts of assumptions, myths, beliefs, and stories. I liked that Scientific American article about the economics of climate change and especially the point that many decisions that economists must make are based on ethical judgments not economic verities. You make the point that Buddhist Economics is "in many ways, a regional, cultural concept that is fully shrouded in Buddhism." LOL well I think you are ahead of the game simply for that observation. Economists, it seems to me, aren't very good at looking for what Rappaport called the "cognized environment." It's important if only to be more realistic (scientific) about the operational environment. The operational environment even if not the focus of your study cannot be ignored. You've identified the purpose of the economy is for people to make happy lives--well you've figured out that happiness is somehow essential to economics. Buddhist economics takes seriously not just what is "out there" but also what is "in here." I agree that Americans like me wonder what Buddhism could possibly have to do with economics? But there are many Americans like us who know that meaning, perhaps a consistency with what is "out there" and what is "in here," is vital. Economics seems somehow off the rail because as a discipline practiced here doesn't seem to acknowledge the importance of this. Buddhist Economics takes seriously this quality of knowledge. Shoot I babble on so long. Let me just put up a link to a paper by Jeff Vail `The New Map: Terrorism and the Decline of the Nation-State in a Post-Cartesian World`_ (PDF). I like the title, especially the "Post-Cartesian World" bit. One of the reasons I find the work you are doing so important is that so many challenges we face require a better study of economics; we need economics which can enable human happiness. Vail's piece simply highlights some of the current challenges we face. We've reached the point where "More!" isn't a good answer. Ha! But what is a good answer for today? .. _`article`: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/science/27angi.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=2 .. _`Re-uniting development economics`: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/05/re-uniting-development-economics.html .. _`Pigs for the Ancestors`: http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/157766101X?tag=miro-20 .. _`Roy Rappaport`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Rappaport .. _`The New Map: Terrorism and the Decline of the Nation-State in a Post-Cartesian World`: http://www.jeffvail.net/thenewmap.pdf ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:44:20 PDT I think you're a good sport for opening up discussions like this. And especially a good sport to let me ramble on in your discussion threads ;-) I still haven't gotten around to the links I compiled for my first--and aborted--attempt to respond to your post. I do want to get around to them, but it seems other things come to mind first. Surely when you are introducing student to doing a research paper one of the points you make is that students should be realistic in choosing a manageable topic. The same advice goes at the graduate level as well. Perhaps I'm not really understanding your intentions with this post well enough. I imagine that you are stepping back to look at the big picture of economics and how Buddhist Economics fits within the larger discipline. In other words to get some perspective so as to find ways to conduct research within a Buddhist Economics school that "fits" somehow with the broader discipline. LOL, now clearly my lack of study makes my perspective distorted. I've often wondered why it is that I act like it's good to have an opinion on everything. Hum, not sure how to solve that puzzle... In my rambling in previous entries one point that I've tried to make is that I see Economics as part of the not-science side of the bifurcated knowledge system, Sometimes this binary view of knowledge is rendered science/humanities; but the realm of social and behavioral sciences are wedded to empirical study and often are considered on the science side. I think it is useful, however, to make a distinction between the "hard" sciences and other fields because such a distinction reminds that these "other" disciplines lack the unified paradigms of the "hard" sciences. But economist often seem militant in positioning economics in the realm of hard science. Many people easily equate "wealth" and "money." I don't think they are the same. But it's hard to actually define either term in fundamental ways. It doesn't seem that Economics spends much effort in defining either, taking it for granted that we know what both terms mean. In "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"--Chapter VI-- among other places `Buckminster Fuller`_ proposed a definition for wealth--he modified the definition in several ways in different places: "Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives." Here's a really smart sentence by `Phil Jones`_: The more effective the internet and the web are at helping us communicate and co-ordinate, the less money will be involved. Because ultimately **the economy is a communication network and money is its protocol** The network is not the means to the *end* of money. I like viewing wealth as forward days for human beings and the economy as a communication network. But such a view is non-standard to say the least. However, there are scholars in numerous fields looking at the ways that the internet changes things and their views of wealth and money are not so standard too. So the links I want to get around to sharing are to a few well-known people who are looking at the internet and society. I think somehow they are related to Buddhist Economics, but so far I haven't worked out how:-) I have some ideas, but I'll leave them until tomorrow. .. _`Buckminster Fuller`: http://bfi.org/node/422 .. _`Phil Jones`: http://platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/07/tcpip-vs-dollar.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:32:35 PDT I enjoy your posts so much, John. Since I don't have many people around here to jabber with, you provide me that crucial thing that is missing in my life. I need someone to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off of and you are willing and able to do that. Thank you. Lately I haven't responded much because life is overwhelming. If you can imagine a semester starting without having all of the staffing done - that happens here every semester and it drives me crazy. Imagine a university with a program that is ready to graduate students who have never sat down with an academic adviser...it is a nightmare. Of course when you point out these glaring deficiencies, you land up doing the work to repair them. (I should learn to keep my mouth shut, huh?) A man from Los Angeles who has taught consumer behavior here for a couple of years, managed to talk himself into a full time position as Business Manager for the program. He is to go out and sell our International BBA program to students and to international companies for both internships and hiring opportunities for our students. He has decided that we need a learn and earn program in the faculty and sent out stuff today to open the "InterCafe" - serving yuppie American food - at yuppie American prices. He hasn't a clue. And as I read that stuff....the menu, the prices, I was so turned off. Most of what he wants to serve is stuff that needs to be imported and is expensive. It's not particularly healthier. It would be comfort food for westerners (and the visitors would pay the prices) but for Thais it would be either luxury food or prestige food, if you know what I mean. It is such a not Buddhist Economics thing. So totally not sufficiency economy. OMG .... I am becoming Thai... no ... Thais are becoming American .... But I am mot like that so am I not American? I get so confused ..... The power has gone out and I am on battery...and have no internet because the modem requires power.... guess I will save this and close down and watch the storm.... The only thing worse than narrow bandwidth is no bandwidth. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:00:36 PDT So nice to see your post Linda. Last night I wrote something but kept getting an error message when I wanted to post, so I saved it, now I guess I'll edit it and try to post. I think you're a good sport for opening up discussions like this. And especially a good sport to let me ramble on in your discussion threads ;-) I still haven't gotten around to the links I compiled for my first--and aborted--attempt to respond to your post. I do want to get around to them, but it seems other things come to mind first. There are scholars in numerous fields looking at the ways that the Internet changes things, so the links I want to get around to sharing are to a few well-known people who are looking at the Internet and society. I think somehow they are related to Buddhist Economics, but so far I haven't worked out how:-) Surely when you are introducing students to doing research papers one of the points you make is that students should be realistic in choosing a manageable topic. The same advice goes at the graduate level as well. Perhaps I'm not really understanding your intentions with this post well enough. I imagine that you are stepping back to look at the big picture of economics and how Buddhist Economics fits within the larger discipline. In other words to get some perspective so as to find ways to conduct research within a Buddhist Economics school that "fits" somehow with the broader discipline. Now clearly my lack of study makes my perspective distorted. I've often wondered why it is that I act like it's good to have an opinion on everything. Hum, not sure how to solve that puzzle... In my rambling in previous entries one point that I've tried to make is that I see Economics as part of the not-science side of the bifurcated knowledge system, Sometimes this binary view of knowledge is rendered science/humanities; but the realm of social and behavioral sciences are wedded to empirical study and often are considered on the science side. I think it is useful, however, to make a distinction between the "hard" sciences and other fields because such a distinction reminds that these "other" disciplines lack the unified paradigms of the "hard" sciences. But economist often seem militant in positioning economics in the realm of hard science. My view is that economic study would benefit from the analytic methods of the humanities. Both inductive reasoning from empirical data and deduction from fundamentals is important. The deduction part gets tricky because of the lack of a unified paradigm in economics. Economics of course has a "dominant" paradigm which is connected to Western culture and and power. In Western academies, `Cultural Studies`_ seem sort of a thorn in the side of "right thinking" scholars. Last night I was reading the `Making Sense of Darfur`_ blog. The post was introducing an upcoming series of post discussing David Keen's book `Complex Emergencies`_. Alex de Waal made this observation of Keen's method: *Complex Emergencies* is about reading wars actively, by engaging intellectually with data and subjecting it to critical analysis. This is not a technical exercise: the spirit of Michel Foucault is always close to Keen’s writing, and – arguably with some generosity – Keen asserts that Foucault’s florid style is intentional, the aim being to remind the reader not to lay claim to scientific knowledge. The implication is that the knowledge behind the systems of violence explored in the book is constructed and so too is the critique. Keen's approach seems a bit like what I have in mind for economic study. In any case the observation that economic knowledge is constructed is what I think, and that so many economists pretend otherwise is one of my sore points about the discipline. Many people easily equate "wealth" and "money." I don't think they are the same. But it's hard to actually define either term in fundamental ways. It doesn't seem that Economics spends much effort in defining either, taking it for granted that we know what both terms mean. In "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"--Chapter VI-- among other places `Buckminster Fuller`_ proposed a definition for wealth--he modified the definition in several ways in different places: "Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives." Phil Jones is a British coder living in Brazil and a friend on the Internet. Here's a really smart sentence by `Phil Jones`_: The more effective the internet and the web are at helping us communicate and co-ordinate, the less money will be involved. Because ultimately **the economy is a communication network and money is its protocol** The network is not the means to the *end* of money. I like viewing wealth as forward days for human beings and the economy as a communication network. But such views are non-standard to say the least. However, there are scholars in numerous fields looking at the ways that the Internet changes things and their views of wealth and money are not so standard too. So the links I want to get around to sharing are to a few well-known people who are looking at the Internet and society. I'll get around to talking about these changes eventually. But your story about the Internet Cafe really illustrates the sorts of contradictions that globalization is showing up in Western academics, including economics. .. _`Cultural Studies`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies .. _`Making Sense of Darfur`: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2008/06/02/complex-emergencies/ .. _`Complex Emergencies`: http://www.amazon.com/Complex-Emergencies-David-J-Keen/dp/0745640206/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212516019&sr=8-1 .. _`Buckminster Fuller`: http://bfi.org/node/422 .. _`Phil Jones`: http://platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/07/tcpip-vs-dollar.html ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:46:05 PDT Opps, I see what I wrote actually was published. LOL well you can see my editing in action with the two posts. I know that's not an advantage, too many words simply get in the way. But the issues you are addressing are so important and I don't really have others in my life who are talking about them seriously as you are. Having already repeated myself with the two similar posts above, perhaps it's a bit annoying to try to summarize the points. But I'm trying to strain out the solid bits. One of the threads in these posts has to do with the nature of economics as a discipline. The point is to make a critique of economics. Many economist consider the discipline as science. The scientific method is a powerful way of knowing, but not the only way. The most significant advancements in scientific knowledge are about physical things. Stuff is obviously an important object of study for economists. But there is a pitfall which economists often fall prey: The map is not the territory; the name is not the thing named. You define mindfulness: mindfulness thinking about what you are doing thinking about why you are doing it thinking about what the effects of doing it are going to be Oh yes all of that, but I can't help but think there is something essential about Buddhist ideas of mindfulness that definitions obscure. One insight of Buddhism and of mediators everywhere is: "We are not our thoughts." So one of the purposes of meditation to to appreciate our being not just our thoughts about being. So my purpose for trying to critique the discipline of economics especially in re science as a method, is to point to the challenge of being clear about a distinction between names and objects. I put in Fuller's stab at what wealth is because it seems odd that economics pays little attention to definitions of wealth. It seems to me that how we envision wealth has a great impact on how we think about the economy. I am quite fond of Fuller's humanistic conception of wealth. `John Robb`_ quotes Rothkopt in the *Financial Times*--the link has expired-- with a disturbing factoid: Rothkopf: "the world's 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5bn" Most people "know" that a few people have almost everything and most people have almost nothing, but I think most people have a hard time fathoming that. It doesn't make sense. Perhaps that cognitive dissonance is part of the reason most people have a hard time being too interested in economics. So one reason to put Fuller's notion of wealth into the mix is to suggest that one of the great appeals of Buddhist Economics is that it's economics as if people--regular people--matter. Phil's distinction between the economy and money is quite useful. First it's helpful to understand that the economy is not money. Second, I think his observation that the economy is a communication system is quite important. Our current economic system concentrates assets in the hands a very few. Money seems to flow all about, but there is a very clear direction to all the flows. I think of myself as a reasonably well-informed person, but I don't believe I could name even a dozen of the 1100 richest people in the world. Money flows to a very few, but few of us know to whom the money flows. Introducing the notion of the economy as a communication system is a way to introduce links to people thinking about the ways that the Internet changes things and my attempt to find some connection between those discussions and mindfulness. I love the TED Talks although I've not really watched and listened to many of them. What I've done is to listen to a few talks over and over ;-) One of the talks I've viewed several times is `Jill Bolte Taylor`_, a brain researcher who had a stroke. She talks about her keen observations about her experience of a stroke. One of the points she makes is that we have two brains. She says: The right hemisphere functions as a parallel processor and the left hemisphere functions as a serial processor. This talk says something very important about the nature of mindfulness. Mindfulness isn't simply thinking. Mindfulness includes the `parallel processing`_ of our right brains .. _`John Robb`: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/johnrobb/2008/05/trend-lines-in.html .. _`Jill Bolte Taylor`: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229 .. _`parallel processing`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_processor ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:25:41 PDT Thank you for the link to Jill Bolte Taylor's talk. My office all listened to it this morning. Totally inspiring. I also just sat down with a Chicago Book catalog. Argghh...to have access to a library! I made a list of books I want to read - 11 books, $375.90 ..... man, the price of knowledge. Off to meetings but I wanted to not forget to say thank you. :-D ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:27:59 PDT The price of knowledge indeed. I truly love the Internet, but books provide better context for knowledge. Clearly I love brainstorming with you about economics. But I am well aware that mastery of the subject, even a tiny branch of it, requires great effort and attention. I haven't lent my attention nor expended the effort. So I'm sure I come across as sophomoric and seem to take cheap shots. I still think that ordinary people talking about important subjects like economics is a very good thing. It's just important for me to remember how little I actually know. I came across a `quote`_ by Lewis Lapham this afternoon which made me smile: An English professor who had marked one of my papers with an "F" because I had proposed an unauthorized view of a 17th century divine. In the margin of the paper, the professor had written, "I don't care what you think; I'm only interested in knowing that you know what I think." The message pretty much defined the thesis of a Yale education at the time. Part of the impetus for taking the Buddhist out of Buddhist Economics is perhaps the hope that your work might be considered a part of economics and therefore paid some attention. But that's a hard row to hoe. Speaking of Lewis Lapham, I had let my subscription to Harpers lapse, but re-subscribed and today both May and June arrived in the mail. In the May issue is an article by Wendel Berry, `Faustian Economics: Hell hath no limits`_. I don't know whether you used to read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and if you did whether you remember Clarke Thomas? Thomas still writes for the paper as old as he is. I imagine "back in the day" that more journalists were like Thomas, but I suspect that like in all other endeavors the reality is that talent is rare. In any case I'm fan of Thomas because he seems to have a good eye for fundamentally important issues. And what he writes is a pleasure to read--usually will a local angle--well sourced and concise. Yesterday he wrote on peak oil, suggesting that city leaders had better pay attention. I wrote to Thomas thanking him for the piece and sent him a link to `Transition Culture`_. I think the `Transition Towns`_ model is really quite a significant recent development. Ever since I first started reading about it I've given thought to how what is primarily a UK-based phenomenon might be translated into the USA. It's not so easy and I'm fairly lazy. The suburban reality of most of America is really daunting. I like reading `Wendell Berry`_, but I've got to admit he's something of a scold. I'm afraid that my laziness isn't something recent. I was lazy as a kid too, at least not always so good at attending to the things I was supposed to. The result is that over the years I've become rather inured to scolding. Now, I guess, I'm lazy and thick-headed. Berry looks at the "unscientific faith" that Americans that somehow The American Way of Life is indestructible, and that as far as the problem of gas and energy goes, "science will find and answer." He thinks these beliefs "look like a sort of national insanity." I've got to admit he's got a point. One of the aspects of the Transition Towns is how meeting the limits of oil and "powering down" is presented as a great opportunity to build the world we always dreamed of. I think that sort of positive frame is very helpful if for no other reason than despair easily feed apathy--a lazy man knows. There's a adage--at least rock song by Timbuk3--that there are two medicines: laughter and tears. I do sort of bounce between the two, so I'm back to Berry. Here's bit from his article that speaks to the importance of mindfulness in economics somehow: I am well aware of what I risk in bringing this language of religion into what is normally a scientific discussion. I do so because I doubt that we can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some recourse to our cultural heritage. We are, after all, trying now to deal with the failures of scientists, technicians, and politicians to "think up" a version of human continuance that is economically probable and ecologically responsible, or perhaps even imaginable. If we go back into our traditions, we are going to find a concern with religion, which at minimum shatters the selfish context of the individual life, and thus forces a consideration of what human beings are and ought to be." Buddhist Economics it seems to me takes this consideration of human beings into consideration. Buddhism doesn't easily translate across traditions, but this essential consideration: "what human beings are and out to be" is not simply a Buddhist concern. So Buddhist Economics provides an example of how economics can take this seriously. .. _`quote`: http://jacksatu.blogspot.com/2008/05/english-professor-who-had-marked-one-of.html .. _`Lewis Lapham`: http://jacksatu.blogspot.com/2008/05/english-professor-who-had-marked-one-of.html .. _`Faustian Economics: Hell hath no limits`: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082022 .. _`Transition Culture`: http://transitionculture.org/essential-info/why-transition-culture/ .. _`Transition Towns`: http://transitiontowns.org/Main/HomePage .. _`Wendell Berry`: http://brtom.org/wb/berry.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:02:04 PDT Dearest, John, Thank you so much for sharing the Harper's article by Wendell Berry. I have engaged with David Braden for a long while now and I have always stumbled on his denial of scarcity. This article helped me understand at a deep level why, and now I have only to try to lift that understanding out of the depths to a place where I can explain it. :-) Economics likes to talk about making decisions on how to use scarce resources for unlimited WANTS. I doubt not that man has developed a taste for unlimited wants. However, our needs are limited. Even when those unlimited wants exceed the limited needs and often destroy or at least damage us in the process. And yet the things that make us human and social creatures are in fact unlimited. Loving, caring and beauty have no bounds; because my mother loved my father didn't mean that she cared an iota less for me or any of my brothers and sisters. People have died from over indulging in even necessities (obesity and its hazards) but I have never heard of anyone who died from being loved too much. In one of the Randy Pausch lectures, he talks about the one economic term that he felt everyone should really understand: opportunity cost. His reasoning was related to time management. Once you have used an hour of time for one thing, you can never get it back. It is a recognition of the limits of our time. I find that the times that cause me the most stress are times when I don't recognize the limits around me and very often they are the limits of my time. There are only so many things that you can fit into 24 hours. One of the things that I am slowly (very slowly) understanding is a Thai thing that drives me crazy. It drives me crazy I think because I still have that western efficiency mentality that tries to maximize production. It tries to stretch time. It doesn't stop and recognize that sometimes people need time to to bathe themselves in those unlimited resources of love and caring - of relating to people and taking care of each other. Someday, maybe, I will learn how to do that. .. image :: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3092/2559513829_254646644c.jpg This is a slide form one of my lectures this last week. I need to think about how I change this to measure well-being if I spend all of my TIME making computers **OR** I spend all of my TIME cultivating those unlimited resources. Perhaps plotting computers versus community? .. image :: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3010/2559513739_3231b78e51.jpg What is the opportunity cost of spending time with your family? Or maybe it would be better to ask was is the cost of making 1 computer in terms of your family life? Can I use time and community in these common graphs to better describe what Buddhist Economics is? Economics where people matter...? ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:24:32 PDT :Modified: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:39:46 PDT **(I needed someplace to put something til I got to the office. Gmail wasn't working and my thumb drive was in the office.)** ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:26:38 PDT I had a social weekend ;-) We've gone from cool Spring to a heat wave too. Saturday my rose bushes were barely blooming, now they're in full bloom. Mindfulness is really something keeping me thinking. I expressed to Linda something about sharing a generation, we're Baby Boomers. Barak Obama was born in 1961, some people end the BB generation at 1960 others at 1964. But Obama seems of the next generation to me, and Linda seemed to allude to feeling that way too. Now I'm not really comfortable with the stereotypes around Generation X. Maybe the generalizations about generations aren't really very valuable, but they do seem interesting. According to the Wikipedia article on `Buddhist Economics`_ that Ernst Schumacher coined the tern in 1955, the year of my birth. My good friend `David Pohl`_ is about ten years younger than I am. Thinking of him is partly why I think Obama is of the next generation. Friday night he came out with another good friend Bob. David and Bob come out several times a year and we have a fire and listen to music. Bob's daughter and son in law live near me and they came for a while too. They brought their one year-old baby girl along too. The way that the recent generations are talked about isn't very clear, but let's just call the young couple Generation Y. David and Bob are both avid music lovers. David really has studied the Baby Boomers, especially with an eye towards the artists of the generation. He also has studied Yoga for a long time. In many ways he's a better authority on the cultural zietgist. His father was a high school social studies teacher who also came out against the Vietnam War early. So David even when very young had his eyes pealed on events. I'm the fourth of five kids. When my younger brother started kindergarten, my mother started to work as a teacher in about 1965. We had moved to Greenville, South Carolina. School desegregation was a big issue then. So a little like David because of his father, the Civil Rights movement was something even as I youngster I paid attention too. And the way that paying attention to Civil Rights affected us is something shared between Linda and I. The summer of 1968 was forty years ago. What an awful summer, and yes I do remember. I graduated high school in 1973. I think the five years were spent trying to figure out what was happened in 1968. Another one of the social events I attended this weekend was a high school graduation party for the son of good friends. I'm very fond of this young man--I'm sure my fondness for him must seem a little sappy, who that age wants to be reminded of when they were little? Over the weekend I pulled "The Politics of Experience" by `R. D. Laing`_, a book written in 1968. Sometimes books that seemed important to me at the time--early 70's--seem hopelessly dated when read them now. There are aspects of "The Politics of Experience" which do seem dated. Among them is the issue of the masculine default; my ears are attuned to the more gender inclusive language customary today. I suspect the gist of the book would seem dated to a young person reading it today. But for me there are many ideas that I've been wrestling with for more than thirty years, so it hardly seemed outdated. Laing wrote: "The truth that I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it." I can imagine my friend Bob's son in law rolling his eyes over that. I can be sure he will never read the book. And I would be at a loss to tell him that I've spent years trying to sort out that idea in one way or another for so many years. In the June issue of Harpers is a book review essay discussing ideas in five books about the self and the brain. One of the books discussed is `The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul`_. I haven't read the book, but I can tell that my biases are more towards monism rather than dualism. That said, I'm not inclined to think that the only thing which can be proven to exist is matter. Ideas matter to me. `Chris Blattman`_ linked today to an essay about Obama's economists and quoted a health eonomist Victor Fuchs: Fuchs wrote that a general, systemic failure was common to all the policies that plague the provision of such services. It stemmed from “our unwillingness and inability to discuss and resolve value issues that form the foundation of any society.” He continued, At the root of most of our major choices about social problems are choices about values. What kind of people are we? What kind of life to we want to lead? What is our vision of the good society? How much weight do we want to give to individual freedom? How much to equality? How much to security? How much to material progress? If we emphasize only individual responsibility, we come close to recreating “the jungle,” with all the freedom and all the insecurity and inequality that prevails in the jungle. On the other hand, if we ignore individual responsibility and rely entirely on social responsibility, the best we can hope for is the security of a well-run “zoo.” My rambling posts even get to me! The link that I'm trying to make between R. D. Laing, brain scientists on the nature of consciousness, and Fuchs on the importance of discussing values, is mindfulness. Laing cogently argues the case against the notion that psychology has nothing to do with people's experiences, but only their behavior. He places experience at the center of psychology. The problem of consciousness is one that seems to attract scientists bent on demonstrating materialism. The mainstream of neuroscience takes this materialism very seriously. What matters is biochemistry. Clearly biochemistry does matter, but I feel certain it's not all that matters. On the other hand, it doesn't really make much sense to me to divide what is into matter and spirit; at least it makes no sense to say that matter can be studied, but the spirit can be left behind. I think that Fuchs' point about the "unwillingenss and inability to discuss and resolve values" as an essential problem in applying economics to policy. I'm so windy, but I really do think that mindfulness sets Buddhist Economics apart from the main stream of economic study and may provide a way to take seriously the the importance of "experience" in the way that Laing discusses it. Main stream economics, it seems does not adequately take into account the "pathologies" of the economic system. Laing was concerned with mental sickness in society. What's interesting to me is how closely his critique maps with a Buddhist view of mindfulness; mindfulness something different from a mind full of ideas. What the musing about generations has to do with any of this I'm not sure. Siddhārtha Gautama was born around 400 BCE. There's a long history of thinking and talking about existence. Laing's book, The Politics of Experience" was widely read by young people back in the day. I'm not sure many young people today would find it so interesting. But the underlying themes are issues of great consequence and have a very long history. Buddhist Economics is a subject which I think many young Americans are ready for. .. _`Buddhist Economics`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_economics .. _`David Pohl`: http://davidpohl.com/bio.html .. _`R. D. Laing`: http://www.oikos.org/ronen.htm .. _`The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul`: http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Brain-Neuroscientists-Case-Existence/dp/0060858834/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213071837&sr=8-1 .. _`Chris Blattman`: http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2008/06/economic-principals-reviews-early.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:34:42 PDT I want to add something here, John, but I need to get pictures...I made such great strides over the week-end but the beauty is in the visuals and I need to get them in digital form. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:12:05 PDT This thread seems to be something of an obsession with me. I do hope that doesn't bug you. As verbose as I am, I know that I'm barely scratching the surface. Indeed I'm rambling about the topic. There are some concepts that have come up that I have some peculiar notions about. One of those is religion. I was raised in a Christian household, Episcopalian by denomination. And as a teenager I was a Jesus Freak. Nowadays I say that I'm not religious. There's a kernel of truth to that, but it also obscures a lot about how I think about things. I am not anti-religious, certainly. Nevertheless in academic research I think there is a real hazard to splitting the world into the spiritual and things. Of particular concern to me is that things be the object of study and what's spiritual be left to God. Laing raises many good points about the study of psychology. He writes: Natural scientific investigations are conducted on objects, or things, or the patterns of relations between things, or on systems of "events." Persons are distinguished from things in that persons experience the world. Thing-events do not experience. Personal events are experiential. Natural scientism is the error of turning persons into things by a process of reification that is not itself part of true natural scientific method. Results derived in this way have to be dequantified and dereified before they can be reassimilated into the realm of human discourse. Now you can't really do economic research without gathering data. The data are important. Laing suggest that "we should speak of *capata* rather than data" because the data are taken out of "a constantly elusiuve matrix of happenings." Mindfulness is a very essential construct to intelligible Buddhist Economics. "Being" not just stuff is central to the project. But there is a strong materialism in most schools of economics, so many economist and academics from many other fields take at a first principle that all that's worth study is stuff. You might be able to imagine me as a young man in college trying to figure it all out. I was engaged in academic study and trying to understand my "crisis of faith." When I picked up Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" The very first essay really ressonated. Here's something that I thought very important then and still do: The conservative laws for energy and matter concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance. Bateson introduced me to ways of rigorously studying precisely the sorts of matters of form which so interested me without recourse to religious or spiritual explanation. I might note that religious and spiritual ideas interest me and often seem to reveal profound truths. But religious language doesn't easily translate or relate to academic discourse outside of religious studies. From a Christian perspective, Buddhism isn't very easy to relate to as a religion, and yet I think most Christians understand Buddhism as a religion. Schumacher's essay on on Buddhist Economics really is about economics in a way that I think an essay on "Christian Economics" would be much harder to keep to economics. As far as my religious views go--not very far probably-- `Creation Spirituality`_ appears to be the stream of modern Christian thought most harmonious with my academic musings on what Bateson called "matters of form." I understand well that Creation Spirituality is considered a heresy by many of my Christian friends. So strong is the materialism of Western academics, the physical science metaphors within economics, where human behavior is thought to act so much like billiard balls, that placing human experience at the center, as Buddhist Economics must, is also considered heresy of another sort. `Karen Armstrong`_ was one of this year's TED Prize winners. Here wish is help to make a Charter of Compassion among the Abrahamic religions happen and then to make people aware of the Charter. Compassion along with mindfulness are important to Buddhism. It maybe that the Abrahamic religions get to compassion at the root by different routes than Buddhism, but there it is. To a great extent what interests me about economics are the pathologies; otherwise sensible people seem to have confidence in ideas which seem downright crazy to me. For example `Chris Blattman`_ links to an interview in the New York Times Magazine with Enrique Pemlosa the former mayor of Bogata. Pemlosa points out something that drives me crazy: We were building much more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness. I quoted Phil Jones as saying that the economy is a communications system with money as it's protocol. R.D. Laing is just one example of someone who has looked at psychology with an eye to taking existence seriously. So in academic psychology there are some examples of looking at pathologies, and especially messed up communication systems. One of the sources of pathology and suffering among people seems to stem from variations on the theme of "Us and Them." Laing looks at family pathology and observes: Such family "homeostasis" is the product of reciprocities mediated under the statutes of violence and terror. In the USA George Lakoff has noted that politics is frequently understood using family metaphors. I suspect that the kinds of understandings psychologists and family therapists have teased out about us and them thinking and the hazards therein, could be quite useful in understanding economic pathologies. The main point is that compassion stands in stark contrast to violence and terror. Compassion follows logically from mindfulness. Placing experience (being)at the center of economics might be a corrective to the sorts of economic pathologies we observe today. I think it is quite possible to do academic work in Buddhist Economics without recourse to a religious or spiritual way of thinking and talking about it. I also believe that concepts in Buddhist economics can be related to religious insights of the many major religions, and think that's a good thing. Buddhist Economics cuts against the grain of many widely held and largely unconscious consensus views in both academics and religion, so relating to both sphere is quite a challenge! .. _`Creation Spirituality`: http://www.creationspirituality.info/Principles.html .. _`Karen Armstrong`: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/234 .. _`Chris Blattman`: http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-development-maxim-make-sidewalks.html ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:26:01 PDT I should be doing some work;-) So my views of religion are a bit peculiar. Just as I imagine I can find truth and beauty in Christianity I imagine I can find truth and beauty in Buddhism. Does that make me a practitioner? My sister and her children used to visit here in the summer. They are grown-ups now. They lived in Florida so the rolling hills around here were something they noticed, especially when riding in the car. Once when my niece Priscilla was very small, 3 or 4, we set off in the car to the store or for some errand. Just out the driveway and Priscilla asked me: "John, do you believe in God?" I proceeded with a fake answer along the lines of "Some people think..." She cut me off and said: Well, I do, except God is nothing real because God doesn't die. I was astounded by her insight. Buckminster Fuller is quoted as saying: God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper. Well, to me it seems, I don't know very much about God. Still my conception is more along the lines of God as a verb. But when we think of verbs we think of doing, and the sense in which God as a verb most interests me is in being. Being it seems is essential to mindfulness. In meditation thoughts are allowed as simply thoughts, meditation isn't simply thoughts, but appreciating there's something more than thoughts. It's that being of myself, others and God that seems important. There is matter and energy, stuff. It also seems to me there is something other than stuff. Consider a group or an organization of people. Now the individual people might be said to be made of stuff, but can the same be said of the group? Is a group stuff? Economics certainly pays attention to stuff, but much of the study and attention is not about stuff but forms of organization which aren't stuff. Buddhist speak of illusion. My sense of it is that Buddhism is pointing to all the not-stuff that makes a difference to us. When we talk of not-stuff, the talk is riddled with metaphors of stuff; for example "psychic energy." One illusion is that ideas, patterns, form, follow the same rules as stuff (matter and energy). To see beyond the illusion must mean at least in part understanding that in the fundamentals of knowledge there is a dichotomy between fundamentals of matter and energy and fundamentals of form and pattern. How to study and talk sensibly about matters of form rather than substance don't have the same sort of consensus that exists among the physical sciences. It's not that there are no ways of talking about matters of form and pattern in a rigorous way, rather not such a firm consensus such as in the physical sciences. Another word, besides God, about which my views are rather heretical is the word values. Values it seems to me are an important subject for economics. What interests me is not values as nouns but the process of valuing. Values draw attention mostly when we think of how they are imparted. And for the most part it seems we imagine that values are inculcated. Back in the early days of college, Louis Rath's book, "Values and Teaching" was one of a handful of seminal books. Raths emphasized valuing rather than values. Values Clarification seems like a short movement in education circles barely worth a footnote. I guess it's interesting to me because I was learned about it when I was young and tried to find out more. In the process I encountered the very strong push back of social forces which viewed the approach as moral relativism. Ten years later when getting my teaching credentials much of the same sort of push back was voiced in the warfare against reading instruction: Reading textbooks were the product of radical "homosexual deconstrutionists." Like most teachers the passions seemed a bit inflamed. Teachers are quite aware how conservative a practice schooling is and textbooks are hardly ever radical! Raths clearly was influenced by American Pragmatists, notably John Dewey. Dewey it seems to me is relegated to about the same place in education as Freud in psychology: A name to remember, but ideas it's safe to forget. Call me old-fashioned, but I find myself still intrigued by Pragmatism and their approach to knowledge, especially how we might come to understand all the important not-stuff of the universe. `Matthew Fox`_ was a Dominican priest important to Creation Spirituality who is now an Episcopal priest. He was forbidden to teach theology by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) when he served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It appears the final straw was over attitudes towards homosexual people--an issue that puzzles me how divisive it is within Christianity. But the theological differences are stark between Fox and Pope Benedict going much deeper than surface the surface issues about gay people and other despised groups. Pope Benedict gave an `address`_ which seemed offensive to many Muslims. No doubt that he is a very learned man. I'm not sure I really get all that he's saying in the lecture, but the subject of the address seems very relevant to what I'm trying to say now about trying to study rigorously the not-stuff. It seems to me that a major difference between Fox and Ratizinger has to do with how they imagine God: whether as a noun or a verb. Creation Spirituality emphasizes in creation, whereas Benedict emphasizes the creation. I'm not a Roman Catholic, but have many friends who are. Pope John Paul II was viewed by many , not just Catholics, as a very holy person. I don't mean to be crass in this, but I can saw it. One way to put it is that I would have willingly handed a baby for Pope John Paul to hold. Now some Catholics are very glad for Pope Benedict, seeing him sort as a "law and order" pope. I might be reluctant to hand over a baby to Pope Benedict afraid he might scare the child. In a way I don't see that as such a bad thing because it rather forces a person to listen and watch Pope Benedict rather than to ascribe some ethereal quality to him. There is no question that Ratzinger is an intellectual. At least I can understand my heresy when he describes it. Take for example these notes on `Liberation Theology`_ Benedict and wide swaths of the Christian community it seems to me think of God as a proper noun. The word Bible is always capitalized, I learned in elementary school. The Bible contains the Word of God. Whereas Fox thinks of God as Verb, God's "is-ness" which is not contained. It seems that Buddhism is more in line with Fox's views. Fox looks over the history of Christianity and sees two main streams: Original Sin and Original Blessing. But as Karen Armstrong notes compassion is one essential that all the Abrahamic religions agree is at the root. How much then does it matter how we get there, that is, how we come to a compassionate understanding? Laing notes: "Only when something has become problematic do we start to ask questions." Economics has become problematic. On one hand our attention is drawn to the twin conundrums of peak oil and global climate change, and on the other hand the economic growth. We have a problem. It seems to me that these are fundamentally problems of life, not-stuff. What we know of the physical world cannot be denied, it's just that the solutions are not primarily physical. What is essential to religion is not stuff. Gregory Bateson liked to remind people that he was a fourth-generation atheist. But his father had them read the Bible at the supper table so they wouldn't become "empty-headed atheists." He also made the point "God is not mocked" quoting Saint Paul. Bateson thought that looking at feature of human religions with an eye to what can become intelligible in light of systems theory and advances in epistemology is a good idea because people have been thinking deeply for centuries and we're bound to discover important insights there. After Bateson's death his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson gathered together his work on the book he was working on to see about making them available in a publishable form. One of the techniques she used was to intersperse chapters of his writing with chapters of her writing on the topics of those chapters. Some of those were in the form of metalogue: a defintion from `here`_: A "metalogue" is a conversational exchange that embodies and offers a clear example of the subject matter being discussed. Here's part of one metalogue: Daughter: Yes, but...but it's different. Every time I lecture about the Gaia hypothesis I find myself warning against the danger of thinking of Gaia as a vis-avis. You can't say, "Me and Gaia," or "I love Gaia," or "Gaia loves me." And you can't say, "I love Eco," either, can you? Father: They are not the same. The notion Gaia is based in the physical reality of the planet--it's Pleromatic, thingish. When I ask people to think about a god who might be called Eco, I'm trying to make them think about Creatura, about mental process. Daughter: The word "process" is important there, isn't it? Father: And also the fact that the interconnections are not entirely tight, and that all knowledge has gaps, and mental process includes the capacity to form new connections, to act as what I have called self-healing tautologies. Daughter: So..tragedy and opposites and the total fabric? And Eco as a nickname for the logic of mental process, the connectedness that holds all life and evolution together? And It can be violated but cannot be mocked? Perhaps It really is beautiful rather than lovable. Father: Beautiful and terrible. Shiva and Abraxas. I'm afraid I've contributed more mush to my already mushy thinking, but I'll post this anyway. I did find a delightful Web page while I was looking to see if Warren McCulloch's "What is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man that He May Know a Number?" or any part of it was online. I was looking for context for McCulloch: What do we think a man is? What is it to be human? What are these other systems that we encounter and how are they related? `The page`_ is a wonderful remembrance of Warren McCulloch by Heinz von Foerster. There's a cartoon of McCulloch with a balloon that reads: Don't bite my finger, look, where I am pointing. .. _`Matthew Fox`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fox_(priest) .. _`address`: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html .. _`Liberation Theology`: http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/ratzinger/liberationtheol.htm .. _`here`: http://www.seishindo.org/newsletter/2006/09-embodied-presence.html .. _`The page`: http://www.vordenker.de/metaphysics/metaphysics.htm ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:33:52 PDT Just a quick and dirty post to see what I have been conjuring in my little mind. .. image :: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3040/2576203407_1342f4b349.jpg If we are interested in Economics as if people matter, we are not interested in the opportunity cost of computers in terms of food but rather we are interested in the opportunity cost of the produced item in terms of the cost to the individual. When people work they are giving up their time to do something else. There are only 24 hours in a day and part of them have to be used in sleeping and other activities. The weight of these activities and the priority is completely individual. When we look at the graph, it might seem that the opportunity cost of the production on one chair is 2 hours of free time (It takes 2 hours to make one chair) but because there is a commute time it is more. the 4th chair has really cut into the time that would have been used for something else. To increase efficiency, you need to reduce either the time it takes to make the chair or the commute time. Maybe the employer figures a way to offer affordable (competitive) housing that reduces the commute time. This allows th eemployee to make the additional chair without compromising the things that are important in the person's life. It needs more thought and work. I will get there. Not right now! tata ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:48:35 PDT At the core the three questions the emperor asks in `Tolstoy's story`_ are about opportunity costs. The answers the emperor discovers are very local. When I read your first entry many of the links that came to mind had to do basically with issues of the Internet and society. I'm not sure really why I didn't post that response; well one reason is I didn't finish it. But another reason I think is the difficulty I have in trying to understand ethics in a time when communication is global. Last year around this time of year I was in the garden. Probably I was doing something like breaking the iris stems off and pulling weeds in any case my butt was on the ground. I was thinking and my thoughts traveled to something I'd read about global warming and the extinction of all flowering plants. Ha, at that moment the extinction of all people seemed like a minor matter compared to plants. Under the shade of a mulberry tree and surrounded by so many plants and flowers, my grief was palpable. Voltaire ended "Candide" with: We must cultivate our garden. In one way or another I try to live ethically. Like most things I'm not so good at it. But I think that my understanding of what it is I am to do is local in the ways that both Tolstoy and Voltaire suggest. The challenge of global climate change is that it's global. What to do and an individual may be local, but the big global nature of it really can't be ignored. Since reading Laing, I seem to be on a Sixties kick and just pulled out my copy of Marshall McLuhan's `Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man`_. Technology is running ahead of me and I can't keep up. Global climate change as a result of human technology is quite terrifying. And it's unsettling to rest hope to avert catastrophe for all life on the planet in further development of technology. Schumacher's essay `Buddhist Economics`_ is remarkable for its clarity about such a number of topics in such a short space; quite unlike my prolix ramblings! One topic is the distinction between tools and machines: there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. My reading is probably hopelessly out of date. I'm not a particularly good reader to begin with, but it's also true that it seems to take me years to draw out meaning from the books that seem to me to contain good clues for discovering knowledge that makes a difference. I think I did read "Deschooling Society" by `Ivan Illich`_ back in the day (It was first published in 1971) but I don't have a copy of the book. I do have his book `Gender`_. From what I can gather this book was not well received, especially by feminists. It is out of print as is `Shadow Work`_. From "Gender" is this description of shadow work: Unlike the production of goods and services, shadow work is performed by the consumer of commodities, specifically , the consuming household. I call shadow work and *labor* by which the consumer transforms a purchased commodity into a usable good. I designate as shadow work the time, toil, and effort that must be expended in order to add to any purchased commodity the value without which it is unfit for use. Therefore, shadow work names an activity in which people must engage to whatever degree they attempt to satisfy their needs by means of commodities. It technology seems both our downfall and possible salvation the distinction which Schumacher points to between tools which enhance our skills and power and machines which turn our work into being mechanical slaves seems very important. Machines are incapable of ethical judgments but it seems the continued existence of life depends upon ethical judgments. Shadow work seems related to your musings on opportunity costs. When you talk about efficiency my thoughts turn towards prices, something economists are want to study. Price seems to me not the best approach to take a stab at this. One problems is that shadow work is not priced, and so even its existence seems questionable to mainstream economists. `Stirling Newberry`_ was someone I wanted to link to when I first read your post. Partly because he was on something of a tear over at `The Agonist`_. But searching Newberry's posts at The Agonist is a pain and I got frustrated. I like to figure out how to access his writings better, and will try invent some ways. If you are interested `this essay`_ titled "The Progressive Century" provides an introduction to some of his major economic themes. But in regards to your discussion of opportunity costs and my trying to relate them to shadow work, I'm looking for some recent writing on the current monetary crisis and can't seem to find it. Newberry points out that American monetary wealth is premised on housing. Unlike gold that can be rounded up and put somewhere like Fort Knox housing prices depend on a care and feeding which gold does not. Suburban house prices require inexpensive gasoline for people who live in suburban houses to get to work. As gas prices increase the value of the suburban houses are put under pressure. That Americans have so leveraged their monetary wealth, this pressure becomes unbearable to the economy as a whole. Okay, I don't quite get all the nuances that Newberry includes, but that's the gist I want to point to. Our monetary wealth here in the USA depends upon shadow work, driving to work is a form of shadow work, but the very existence of shadow work is something which economists have tended to ignore. When Schumacher begins from the thesis: "Right Livelihood" is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics. he proceeds towards a trenchant critique of economics. We've been paying attention to the wrong things all along! Small and local makes sense, but still I'm having trouble mapping that prescription to the global challenges, especially anthropomorphic climate change, which are so pressing. Globalization is a tough topic. I'm happy that a few economist blog because it allows someone as unschooled as I am to listen in on the conversations. I've had Tyler Cowen's `Marginal Revolution`_ for a long time. Lately I notice I've not been bothering to read it. I do read `Dani Rodrik`_ regularly. Rodrik has been pointing to the problems with applying empirical evidence from micro economic study to policy at the macro economic level in numerous posts. In `this post`_ Rodrik takes on Cowen: The trouble is that the moment you take the experiment (Rodrik links to a study on bed nets by Cowen) from Western Kenya and want to use it to inform policy in another setting, you need to make all kind of additional, not rigorously tested assumptions (about how similar or dissimilar the settings are and how these affect the likely outcomes). By the time the evidence is used, it has become as "soft" as many other kinds of evidence that development economists traditionally rely on. I've babbled on too much, but the point I'm trying to make is that while Buddhist Economics certainly doesn't automatically tell us the answers about what to do, the beginning premises provide a direction. They also provide a needed contrast to examine the beginning premises of more conventional economics. Much of what has been felt safe to ignore in economics now no longer seems so even to conventional economists. The good news about that is it seems the time is ripe for discussions about the fundamental premises upon which study proceeds. The rules of the game are up for discussion and Buddhist Economics has much of relevance to give to the discussions. .. _`Tolstoy's story`: http://www.yuni.com/library/docs/200.html .. _`Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man`: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262631598/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top .. _`Buddhist Economics`: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html .. _`Ivan Illich`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich .. _`Gender`: http://www.amazon.com/Gender-Ivan-Illich/dp/0930588401/ref=sr_1_35?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213471622&sr=8-35 .. _`Shadow Work`: http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Work-Open-Forum-Illich/dp/0714527106/ref=sr_1_33?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213471622&sr=8-33 .. _`Stirling Newberry`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stirling_Newberry .. _`The Agonist`: http://agonist.org/ .. _`this essay`: http://agonist.org/stirling_newberry/20080515/the_progressive_century?highlight=stirlin%2Cnewberry .. _`Marginal Revolution`: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/ .. _`Dani Rodrik`: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/ .. _`this post`: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/06/the-economist-evaluates-the-randomized-evaluators.html ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:50:55 PDT If you look at all of those little 1 hour strips on my graph, John, I think you will see they are all those same kinds of things that you refer to as shadow work. Almost all of them can be monetized...I can hire someone to do my shopping and then it becomes a part of the economy rather than shadow work. I can hire someone to teach me and monetize learning. etc. Feminist economics has focused for a long time on how all of the work that is done in the home (mostly by women) is not measured in economics and counts for nothing. Green or Eco-economics has held that in making its assumptions, neo-classical economics has neglected looking beyond its limited view to the effects that economic activity have on the environment both in terms of the impact of negative externalities and sustainability. Man (a limited being) has taken a limited biosphere and attempted to devise a system for using the biosphere to provide for the fulfillment of the unlimited wants of mankind. With all of the assumptions, we have lost sight of the limits and in doing so, created an unsustainable monster that has little concern for the real needs of human beings. Family and personal/community relationships are not considered factors in economics beyond perhaps a limited view that education of man provides a better human resource than ignoring it. I have turned even more skeptical than I was before (and there are people who will tell you that they can't imagine how I could get more skeptical!). People talk CSR...corporate social responsibility...and I think of PR and cover-up. (I should hold a contest for an alternative meaning for CSR that represents how I feel...I will have to work on it.) There was/is an ugly attitude that parents could throw money at their family responsibilities and things would be OK. I didn't believe that and I don't believe most CSR spiels either and mainly for the same reasons. Responsibility is deeper than money. Family/corporate responsibility requires an total "gut" commitment to doing things right. Not spending time with your child and turning around and buying him some new toy doesn't deal with the real problem. Setting aside a portion of your "mega"-profits to build a park somehow seems dishonest while you are spewing contaminants into the biosphere. There is a woman at an International Business School in England who is Buddhist and has brought a Buddhist view of communication and human resources to the field of HR. I don't fully understand what she is doing but it seems more real than business as usual. She looks at people as people with histories and life goals and responsibilities and tries to work with the people so that the work environment considers those facets. It seems to fit under mindfulness. Good Corporate Social Responsibility, it seems to me, needs to look at the corporation, the society and and **at the root** re-evaluate how the two institutions work together to achieve the common good of societal well-being. It will require mindfulness. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:13:53 PDT What I'm doing in this thread is called hijacking. That's not generally very nice, and it may be not nice in this case. Tell me if you'd rather I put this stuff on my personal page. I am trying to engage with the ideas you are presenting. That's something I want to do, but I do hope I'm not being boorish by putting it here. My intentions most certainly are not to disrespect you or your space. You probably know that, but might be a little shy about telling me to put at another space. Please don't be shy, I can be rather dense and insensitive without realizing it, and I know that. Some of the items in your illustration are activities which others can do and could be monetized. But some of them, like personal spiritual development, personal intellectual development, personal physical development, and community development really are not. And those sorts of things along with a few others seem to be basic to right livelihood. The `translation`_ of the Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell begins: The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Last night surfing the Web I came upon an interesting interpretive version by `Ron Hogan`_ which begins: If you can talk about it, it ain't Tao. If it has a name, it's just another thing. I had to read the whole thing. It captures some of the Tao Te Ching very well I think. I especially like that it takes the text as down-to-Earth. Still, I think most Americans like me read or hear the Tao Te Ching as being a little out of this world. I was thinking about the book because I'm finding it hard to think and speak clearly about mindfulness, especially the point that mindfulness is something more than being careful about my thoughts. Mindfulness is attending to a quality greater than my thoughts. I also was thinking about the Tao Te Ching because of `Christopher Alexander`_ who I admire for many reasons, not the least of which is how he has taken seriously mindfulness in his study of design. Alexander introduced a new theory of design in the 1970's with a series of books (Center for Environmental Structure Series). The first book in the series is `The Timeless Way of Building`_. The book is structured with some text in italics so the book can be read for an overview in a fairly short amount of time and then read in a more in-depth way. It also has a detailed table of contents. Right at the beginning Alexander introduces the quality without a name: 2. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. I like the chapter on The Quality very much. Some of the points that Alexander raises about the quality without a name can be understood using Bateson's approach to mental systems. Being of a certain age, I've got a certain fondness for hearing: "That's cosmic man!" But it's also a bit frustrating when it's applied to practical matters. Alexander is concerned with the practical matters of making things. But that's precisely why he's interested in the science of it, and the quality without a name is indeed part of the science he's exploring. His study doesn't separate matter and spirit and say that only matter can be studied scientifically. Alexander proceeds from the idea that, to use Bateson's words, there is a necessary unity between mind (mental systems) and nature. When we look at living systems the form and pattern are intrinsic and cannot be divided out and sequestered as not appropriate for examination. I think that unity is something at the root of mindfulness. And if push comes to shove will admit that unity is cosmic, man. It's a good thing you're skeptical! I'm not sure how serious students could not be skeptical. But it's quite a dance when scholars try to earn their credentials. I'm not sure that it's fair to say that scholars have to make their skepticism somehow palatable, well, that's a metaphor anyway. But it's a hard task making new work so that it maps familiar and available ideas well enough so that others can follow. Among the links I've been meaning to post is `Umair Haque`_ at Harvard Business Online. I find the business strategy discussions quite thought provoking. One problem I have is that Haque keeps talking about how good beats evil and I keep hearing that in terms of a metaphor, while he insists he's not being metaphorical. But to your point about corporate responsibility often being just so much spin, I think we're all on the same page as Haque in thinking that ethics are not something "other" than what gets done. Ethics are not the result of a one hour PowerPoint and a long lunch after which you can get back to work. You may have been reading Haque at `Bubblegeneration`_; he's been at it for a long time in Internet years. But I mention the Harvard Business Online page because it shows how much mainstream business thinking really does "get" that the Internet changes things. And Haque is brilliant! I linked to a page remembering Warren McCulloch. Haque studied neuroscience at McGill. There's a connection somewhere there. And I think the connection has to do with metaphysics being essential to science and rigorous thinking, despite the rather cavalier way metaphysics is jettisoned by "sensible" scholars. `That page`_ remembering McCulloch has lots of great links from it, the sort of links that can take up a great deal of time. My dear Linda, I do understand that time is limited and the demands on your time are enormous. I hope you can just sort of speed through what I write without caring too much about it. Mostly I'm just enjoying trying to get my head around what you're doing with Buddhist economics. Thinking out loud. I feel sure the work you're doing is important. So I'm trying to engage in that, not engage you in argument or to send you on wild goose chases;-) .. _`translation`: http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061142662/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213585379&sr=8-3 .. _`Ron Hogan`: http://www.beatrice.com/TAO.html .. _`Christopher Alexander`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander .. _`The Timeless Way of Building`: http://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213586400&sr=1-1 .. _`Umair Haque`: http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/ .. _`Bubblegeneration`: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/ .. _`that page`: http://www.vordenker.de/metaphysics/metaphysics.htm ---- :Author: Ceris Dien :Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:05:09 PDT Fascinating to read your thoughts Linda (and John!), thanks very much for sharing (though I confess I've not read every single word!) As I say in my profile I'm new to economics, and maths is not exactly my strong point, so I try to approach it with a mixture of amateur science and (I was going to say "poetic awareness", but that sounds horribly pretentious, your word is much better!)"mindfulness". Thanks ever so much, I now know that even if I'm not on the right track (though I think I may be) at least I know I'm not the only one on the road! ;) ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:48:50 PDT Welcome, Ceris! In my personal news I often wander about talking to myself about the thoughts I have doing my "economics" research here in Thailand - a totally foreign culture to my past experience. I am lucky that people wander in and engage with me - like John and now hopefully you. I feel (?), sense (?), know (?) that Buddhist Economics has insights to offer those of us in the west who want to rectify our relationship with nature and each other but figuring out how to understand it with my western mind and how to then communicate it to other people who have no knowledge of Eastern philosophy....that is a challenge. I have a niggling (that is not the right word but I think conveys what I want to say) feeling that it is here that we might find something that can convince people to change their ways since just about the only thing I am sure of these days is stepping up to people in the west and telling them that they have to get their act together and it is going to mean sacrifice ... that will **NOT** work. Oh well...back to the drawing board...and feel free to chime in and give voice to your doubts as well as your ideas! ---- :Author: Abraham Joseph :Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:29:01 PDT :Modified: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:30:36 PDT Isn't mindfulness more about simply allowing the awareness of whatever thinking and feeling might be going on? Isn't the purpose of mindfulness more to be fully aware of what is going on in the 'mind'? ---- :Author: David Bale :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:22:27 PDT Hi Changent, good to have you here on Ned and thanks for your comments. You've prompted me to take part! I don't think I've participated in this thread of Linda's previously, except for giving the odd point, but I feel I must respond to your comments. Firstly, I would agree that mindfulness is about being not merely conscious of what is going on in the mind but "fully aware". However, I doubt that this is the full purpose of mindfulness. I take mindfulness as something fairly active and social that we need to work at - certainly not something as passive and intrinsically unrelated to others as you seem to imply when you say: Isn't mindfulness more about simply allowing the awareness of whatever thinking and feeling might be going on? I see it as having something to do with treating people not simply with due respect, but with the fullest respect. Because if we are sufficiently mindful, we will see that everyone requires and receives (though not necessarily deserves) our fullest attention. We need to aim to treat everyone as a VIP - a very important person. When I think I'm am being most mindful, I like to think that the VIP stands for Vigilance, Industry and Patience - these being the three key active ingredients that I think we add to a basic all-encompassing goodness that I believe is built into all of us, if only we can be passive enough to accept the implications that this must inevitably have for our lives. Mindfulness, as I see it, therefore is about 1) being vigilant to past experiences (and learning from it); being vigilant to all our perceptions of the present moment (being alive to every nuance of our moment-by-moment experience); and being vigilant to future events (by anticipating and shaping them) 2) being industrious at all times to ensure that we maximise opportunities for being vigilant, to act on the messages our being vigilant evokes and not to be easily deterred from this task 3) being patient - but not in the passive sense of procrastinating or 'putting off being active until later on'. The active meaning of Patience (coming directly from the Latin root meaning suffering or allowing) is about consciously and purposefully sticking to our mindful intentions no matter what difficulties this may create for us. Not blindly or obstinately sticking to them because we are unwilling to admit in the face of experience that we must wrong, but because we mindfully believe them still to be right. That's my take anyway. ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:24:49 PDT Ahhhh...at last this thread comes to the crux of mindfulness as I study it from a Buddhist/spiritual perspective. Being mindful not of thoughts and form but of being. Christina Jordan sent me a book a while back from Uganda - "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle. It is a strange book for me. Tolle is a Westerner for sure. But mainly what he is sharing is the influence of Eastern thought. There are times when I am reading him and thinking that the only thing new in the book is his ego and arrogance....you would have to have read part of the book to appreciate the caustic in that statement. Claiming to **"KNOW"** what Jesus meant is a bit over the edge for me. And then there was the story I heard the other day where Rene Descartes was talking with Galileo and said "....but I didn't think..." and promptly disappeared. There comes a stumbling point for me where Buddhism - and I think this is particularly true of Theravada Buddhism - becomes too focused on the being and not the form that it belittles and seriously neglects the importance of form. I don't think that is true of the Buddha. There is a sutra about the Buddha walking a long distance specifically to preach for the sake of a specific man. The man was late because of real life problems and when he got there he was hungry and the Buddha advised his disciples to feed the man. Only when the man was fed and comfortable did the Buddha preach and the man was able to understand and entered "the stream" of understanding. Theravada Buddhism seems to me to be the least socially active of all of the Buddhist traditions. And I find that irritating. Being in the present moment means attending to physical as well as spiritual needs. I work very hard at stripping away my ego and becoming unattached. I often don't do very well at it. I think also that not only the Buddha calls us to this but also Jesus and Mohammad. The Christian story of the sisters, Mary and Martha....I am definitely a Martha. I try to be Mary....I don't always succeed. I think I *have* gotten past the whining. :-) David, we are in much the same place. In my trying to be mindful, I use my simple brain and its understanding of form and try to not focus on the form but rather to apply your "Vigilance, Industry and Patience" and pray like crazy that people around me will do the same with me. God knows I need people with patience around me. I will keep looking for the being and trying to appreciate the present moment but forgive me if I am worried about whether you have something to eat, are comfortable and not too hot or cold. ---- :Author: David Bale :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:19:21 PDT Linda says; David, we are in much the same place. Well we will be! Starting next week at Cambridge Railway Station if everything goes to plan! ;) ---- :Author: Abraham Joseph :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:03:21 PDT The interpretation on mindfulness that bounced off the David awareness posits mindfulness as something fairly active and social to be worked at. Everything about Us is already active and social, We being a comprehensive and dynamic system involving many temporal and spatial dimensions and forces, rather than discrete, separate and independent objects and events. The purpose of mindfulness is to enable ever more and more of the distributed perspectives of Our systemhood to disengage from the delusional drama of individual protagonism and its works, toward become able to grasp ever more of this total comprehensive system that We already are. When we truncate or arrest flow and award protagonist initiation to the perspectives participating in the system, We generate the very delusion that mindfulness is intended to dissolve. ---- :Author: Abraham Joseph :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:20:53 PDT This post is evoked by the largest paragraph in Linda's most recent post. One way to regard Thevara Buddhism's apparent neglect of the form and its actions might be to apply a modern metaphor of User, software and hardware. Consciousness is the invisible and intangible User function, interpretations, valuations and imaginations may be regarded as the software function, and human actions may be regarded as biological robot hardware functions interacting with its environment, which includes other such biological robots that are likewise engaged in actions/functions. There is a clear hierarchy here: Only the User experiences what's going on. The software interprets, valuates and ideates. The hardware operates according to the available software. All humans, both 2,600 years ago and today, get a lot of software long before the hardware is expected to operate in its environment as an adult. The User is rendered helpless, because the uploaded software, which the User did not get to choose, is running away with the hardware, according to its programmed content. As Humanity as a whole has been and still is faced with such a predicament, and as our dysfunction and destructiveness as 'human' forms continue to be run by some erronous and defective software that we, as Users, did not get to choose, Thevara Buddhism favoring the still and silently receptive function of mindfulness may be very useful to us. This is because mindfulness that enables the User to focus on, notice and correct software errors, inconsistencies and other defects - can be expected, automatically to improve the behaviors, actions, and activities of the human forms. ---- :Author: Abraham Joseph :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:26 PDT :Modified: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:29:43 PDT This post is evoked by the last paragraph in Linda's recent post. Although mindfulness forces focus upon the typically neglected intangible functionalities of knowing, feeling and imagining, with which we interpret, prioritize and plan the actions of our human forms, it does not compel us to stop taking action. As our actions are mostly driven by the quality of the more intangible content, mindfulness, by facilitating the improvement of such content, advances the improvement of our actions, allowing us to be more effective and efficent at addressing whatever remains important to us. It is not necessary for us to assume that greater intelligence and capability that come from mindfulness will necessarily reduce our survival and productivity. ---- :Author: Ceris Dien :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:45:12 PDT Changent said: Isn't mindfulness more about simply allowing the awareness of whatever thinking and feeling might be going on? Isn't the purpose of mindfulness more to be fully aware of what is going on in the 'mind'? Hi Changent :) I think I see where you're coming from, if you mean the minds of other people as well as your own - like being aware of all the diverse influences that make up a person's identity and of how that affects the way we perceive and respond to things ? If so, I think that's an important part of it :) not all though - it may be a habit I'll grow out of but at the moment I see everything as interacting - people, ecologies, economies - and I try to be "mindful" of that process and my part in it. Anyway, I suspect "mindfulness" is such a personal concept that we'll never get everyone to agree on a definition, I'd go along with David's and Linda's thoughts and probably a whole lot of other people's too, and happily incorporate yours into the mix :-) ---- :Author: Ceris Dien :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:49:21 PDT I missed your last 2 posts, it took me so long to work out how to write mine! Must be because it's bedtime :) ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:14:56 PDT Linda, I just saw that Samak Sundaravej has refused to resign. I do hope that you stay safe--actually my fantasy is you'll get out without a hitch and the politics will be resolved by the time you return. In any case I send you my warm thoughts. As evidenced by by long-winded posts, I have a hard time paying attention, my attention tends to attend to too much at once. In terms of definitions, that's an example of what mindfulness is not! While I think that mindfulness is objective and precise, I also think it cannot be named, as per the Tao and Christopher Alexander's quality without a name. It seems to me that David's ideas of mindfulness are very close to the heart of Schumacher's discussion of Right Livelihood and the foundation of Buddhist Economics. But in my conception of mindfulness it seems that mindfulness is on a different order. What David describes is also closely related to the teaching of analysis in some schools of Buddhism which hold that insight comes from experience, critical investigation, and reasoning `Vibhajjavāda`_ and not by faith. I think Changent is pointing to something very fundamental: Isn't mindfulness more about simply allowing the awareness of whatever thinking and feeling might be going on? Allowing awareness seems before intention. In `Miracle of Mindfulness`_ Thich Nhat Hanh discusses being present for the reality now in our everyday lives, eating a tangerine, washing dishes, playing with children. Now I could do with some discipline and breathing (training) which of course I'm too lazy and too easily distracted to do. But the point is not totally lost on me. Eat an orange, don't do as I do and attend to 100 other things as I scarf the sweet and tart sections down my gullet. Thich Nhat Hanh also discusses how our capacity to attend in the present is enhanced by practicing mindfulness practicing "allowing awareness" through meditation and breathing. My mind wants to name everything. My mind wants to make an intelligible image no matter what. Because I'm like this, I know the pitfalls and I'm often mistaken, beguiled by my own delusions. The middle way requires awareness. As Jill Bolte Taylor discovered through her stroke, the two sides of the brain have strikingly different personalities.Our parallel processor side of the brain isn't so deluded my constructs of our separateness as is our serial processor side. Our actions have consequences, but mindfulness, it seems to me, isn't so much about anticipating consequences, as it is about practicing awareness. It is from mindfulness that our observations and investigations become more critical, our reasoning more precise, and our experience more satisfying. Mindfulness is different from analysis, but our analysis is better for it. .. _`Vibhajjavāda`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibhajjavada .. _`Miracle of Mindfulness`: http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Mindfulness-Thich-Nhat-Hanh/dp/0807012394/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214371212&sr=8-1 ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:05:01 PDT I do not mean to be rude here. When I started this thread I defined what I was trying to talk about. It was not: Isn't mindfulness more about simply allowing the awareness of whatever thinking and feeling might be going on? Nor was it: Isn't the purpose of mindfulness more to be fully aware of what is going on in the 'mind'? I was trying to think through something specific and how to communicate it to a normal western mind. John and David and Ceris accepted that premise. Changent - who ever that might be - chose to come in and steal the thread and define something else to talk about. If this new discussion is going to continue, it will be in Changent's Personal News, not mine. I guess I need to find another way to think out loud than in my Personal News. ---- :Author: David Bale :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:56:57 PDT Linda said: I guess I need to find another way to think out loud than in my Personal News. That would be a great shame! Your Personal News is like your own garden (perhaps you would say "your own backyard") and should be a place you can make just the way *you* want it to be. I'm sure Changent will respect your feelings on this matter. (If not, as the sole owner of this thread-space, you could dis-invite him to your garden by deleting all his posts if he won't stay away.) But, Linda, I'm sure I won't be the only one who will be very disappointed if these flowery arbours and tidy terraces are allowed to fall into disuse! ---- :Author: Gayle Rogers :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:59:25 PDT Linda - please don't stop playing in **"your garden"** - it is a joy. And when I read David's post about VIP - well, it delighted me to the point of watery eyes. I LOVE your personal news threads. Gayle Maree xoxoxox PS: And John, David and Ceris (HI - and welcome to Ned) - you all made me smile and think. Thank you so much. ---- :Author: Abraham Joseph :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:50:52 PDT David is right. I do respect your feelings. I had forgotten this is a personal space. Do let me know if you would like me to delete my comments here. Please consider this stolen space herewith returned, and Changent gone from it. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:31:36 PDT Yikes, I've always had a hard time figuring out the boundaries for discussions in personal news threads here. One of my problems is that I tend to click through to personal news rather than to use the RSS feeds. Using the feeds has the advantage of making it possible to respond on ones own personal news page and to maintain a dialog. I don't do that, and I should. To use RSS go to the page you are interested in, for example people's personal news discussions. At the bottom of the left navigation column is a link to RSS. You can choose the application you want to send the feed to, for example Bloglines or Google Reader. But while I'm still here trashing the place, let me make one observation about mindfulness: Because it plays such a central role in Buddhism, the word has lots of baggage even for a Western audience. The Wikipedia article on the `Noble Eightfold Path`_ introduces a threefold division of the Noble Eightfold Path: Wisdom, Ethical Conduct, and Concentration. Mindfulness is #7 in the Concentration division and Right Livelihood is #5 in the Ethical Conduct division. As a typical American, I find an Eastern way of thinking difficult, and the divisions are made even more so by the sense that the development along the Eightfold Path is integral, or simultaneous. I see much similarity between Linda and David's view of mindfulness, views which I think are quite in line with Buddhist concepts, particularly views about analysis. But that's where the baggage of the word mindfulness gets tricky. People, perhaps especially people in the West, associate mindfulness with meditation. Because Buddhist Economics, at least taking into account Schumacher's brilliant essay, which I think should be taken into account,deals with the Right Livelihood precept, it seems to me to make mindfulness stand for a more integrated construct than Right Mindfulness is an opportunity for confusion. I'm very interested in this discussion. And I absolutely understand that Linda means what she says about not being rude. So I would be interested, when you have the time, to hear your opinions about how properly to engage in this discussion. I suspect the right way is to have linked discussions in our own personal news spaces, but I'd like to hear opinions about that. .. _`Noble Eightfold Path`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:46:55 PDT I invited participation. I want people to come here and engage. That is not the problem. How to explain this.... OK.. I invited you all here to my house to share. I set the menu. I told you what it was. Accepting the invitation, you have, it would seem to me, accepted the menu. It's not fair to come in and say, "No, you should be serving Thai food since you have lived there and have experienced it and know how good it is for people rather than serving Italian food that everyone already knows and understands and is is comfortable with." You didn't even notice that I have modified the Italian food with some of the things I have learned about Thai food. I want to serve you something that you like, and are comfortable with but that you can easily relate to and understand and learn from. If I jump in and serve everyone the mama pad kiemaeow that I had for lunch yesterday, most everyone will take one bite, scream in pain, and run away from the table never to try Thai food again. Asian people do not think the same as western people. It is a different view of life. TOTALLY different. How does that get shared with western people with their very different way of looking at things? That is what I want to talk about. I don't want to talk about how my spaghetti isn't authentic. I don't want to talk about how Thai food is the only truly healthy food in the world and it must be served precisely this way or you lose the "true essence" of Thai food. If I run home and start talking to everyone in the US about how people outside the US look at them, the people will go on the defensive and shut me down. If I go home and say, the world is coming to an end and western people are the cause of it and if you don't give up all of your "stuff" you will bring the end, people will get defensive and drive their cars more to show that they can do it. Oh well....the Buddha didn't convince all Asians and Jesus didn't convince all the people who call themselves Christians....who do I think I am? ---- :Author: David Bale :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:04:20 PDT John said: Using the feeds has the advantage of making it possible to respond on ones own personal news page and to maintain a dialog. I don't do that, and I should. While I applaud your explanation of how to operate via RSS feeds, John, this all sounds far too clever for me - and I don't think we should all be staying inside our own patches anyway. And I don't think you should respond from the distance or safety of your own personal news page. To me, that would cease to be truest form of dialogue. Sometimes the neatest solutions are the least practicable. Like the drawings of Escher. And a personal favourite of mine: how to reduce fixture congestion and abolish the problem of football violence by away supporters at a stroke. The answer is for all clubs not to travel to any of their away fixtures and only to play their home matches instead. The violent fans then stay at home and the number of games that each team plays is halved. Or should be in theory! And if you think I'm way, way off topic here, I think the same principle applies to mindfulness. Tautological explanations may seems attractive and tidy, but they don't actually deal with mindfulness in the real world. Working as a probation officer, there were always those who maintained there need never be a problem about how to deal with offenders who turned up late for an appointment, you simply sent them back to court for breach of their orders. "What if they are only five minutes late because their bus was delayed?" "Well that's their problem: they should have caught an earlier bus" etc etc. (And never mind the issue of prison overcrowding, just keep building more!) Unfortunately, if their lives weren't already pretty chaotic, they probably wouldn't have offended in the first place. So how realistic is it to expect such individuals to be mindful enough to remember to catch an earlier bus, just in case it might be unexpectedly delayed. I don't think there can be quick fixes and easy answers to the question of mindfulness in the real world. Staying on our own patch might avoid the embarrassment of finding that Linda's menu isn't exactly what our pre-conceived ideas might have told us to expect, but it fails to deal with the realities of a world in which we all have to interact, understand one another and appreciate our differences. ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:20:18 PDT Linda made the point that people in the East think differently than people in the West. Boy, a good example of that is trying to keep abreast about the political news in Thailand after I discovered news that the political situation was heating up a little bit. One headline was "PM denies he's insane" and it made me think we would not see that headline here. East meets west dialogs seem pregnant with possibility but bridging the differences can be vexing. A good friend here fell in love with an Indian philosopher, she was working on her Ph.D. in English Literature here. Both are dear to me, but they decided not to marry. In any case not only the relationship, but also the academic work my Indian friend was pursuing, really made me aware of how difficult it is to bridge the different ways of thinking, also how mysterious thinking is. Over the weekend was a lovely party with old friends. I got to talk with the two older teenage sons of a friend I don't really know so well. One of the boys went to one college for a year but found it too expensive, so moved to local college near his mother in Texas and that didn't work. I'm sure there's so much more to the story. But my intuition was that the young man was having big thoughts--you know like "What does it all mean?" We might say he's having spiritual adventures and my curiosity was heightened. But what questions to ask so not to get the same old answers? I didn't come up with great questions. After talking with him I read and old interview in the July/August 1982 Mother Earth News (why I even have old issues is a puzzle) with Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka wrote the book `One Straw Revolution`_. I thought of my friend's son while reading it because when Fukuoka was a young man he also heard the beat of a different drummer like I suspect my friend's son is hearing a different beat. The interview fascinated me with the difference in East-West thinking. Fukuoka studied microbiology and plant pathology, but his life's work has been not-science. He was in the USA at the time of the interview and was asked about how his natural farming was different from organic farming. His answer was that organic farming is still thinking scientifically. Fukuoka is still alive, and I suspect that he still thinks we in the West don't get what he's saying. He's probably right, yet he introduced no-till farming practices, considered the "father" of no-till. No-till farming is very important to agriculture in the USA today. So there's an example of how ideas can spread even when mutual understanding doesn't really jell. Our Western ways of thinking have many streams. Certainly Christianity is an important stream. In my tradition children around 12 study a Catechism and are confirmed by the bishop. The Catechism introduces Christianity in a series of questions and the kids memorize the answers. The answer to the question "What is a sacrament?" is something like "An outward and visible sign of an inward spiritual grace." Christians argue about sacraments all the time, and perhaps I inappropriately have always heard the question more as "What is sacred?" I have always been pleased with the answer because it always has made me ponder what is grace? That to me seems a very interesting question, but I've never introduced the question to a Christian who thought it interesting too. Perhaps my reaction is peculiar, but I always feel joy when I hear or sing the song. In my own peculiar way I think that inward spiritual grace is related to the Buddhist ideas of mindfulness and truth. In the 15th chapter of Luke are three related parables including the Prodigal Son. I've always loved these stories. The impressive thing to me is not so much the repentance of sin, but the joy one experiences in doing so. That joy has a sense of "Aha!" in the way the stories are told. If you've ever tried to teach someone something, and then they get it, "Aha!" that experience of joy is easy to relate to. Or another example is the hymn very well-know to most Americans, `Amazing Grace`_. It was written by John Newton who spent most of his life as a slave trader. I'm not sure at all that Schumacher wrote gave his talk on Buddhist Economics with the thought that it might launch a new approach to Economics in the West. My reading of it is at once using Buddhist precepts to reveal Western patterns of thinking for critique and to encourage tolerance about other paths of development economics in other countries. But the essay is really so smart, and many others have seen that there's something important to Buddhist Economics as an approach to economic study. People in the West like people everywhere think about ethics, about doing the right thing. I brought up the parables and also Amazing Grace because while the Buddhist idea of becoming awake is represented somehow in them. And I mention my frustration about being keen to talk about grace, and what is sacred with Christians and there seems no words to share. The brother of a very good friend is married to a quite fundamentalist Catholic. He is a psychiatrist and has recently become very interested in meditation, much to his wife's horror. He love's Jack Kornfield's work. As a psychiatrist he's well-aware that meditation isn't the solution for everything, but has become very meaningful for himself. I think that his understanding of the limitations has made him delve a bit more deeply into Buddhism than others would. He was raised in a very Catholic family, so his wife is worried about changes in him that are unlikely to happen--like him becoming a Buddhist. Now my dear friend, the psychiatrist's sister, has a Ph.D. in psychology and in particular has studied transpersonal psychology. The two have never really had a way to share where they are coming from in theoretical terms. So perhaps his interest in Kornfeild will be a way for them to share a vocabulary. I'm not trying to be argumentative about a definition of mindfulness. It's a profound construct. In my last post I was trying to make a narrow point which is that in trying to convey ideas about mindfulness to those in the West, there's trouble when people like me have been introduced to mindfulness in some way or another. Do you know the proverbial `Color of the bikeshed`_ from "Parkinson's Law?" Agreement on complex things is easy, but everyone has an opinion about little matters so agreement is harder. One lesson to take from the bikeshed is for me to shut up about mindfulness a bit ("you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so"). I don't really intend to be argumentative. My intention was to point out that many in the West already have a construct of mindfulness, or at least opinions about what Buddhists mean by mindfulness. I'm a bit unclear whether the words in the text box are Joel Magnuson's or Linda Nowakowski's? Magnuson has treaded safely into waters I fear are difficult by using mindfulness and economics in the same breath. So I guess it's time for me to take the standard meaning of the bikeshed to heart and quit yammering. See how hard mindfulness is? Ah, but Linda, don't for a minute waver in your work because others may not understand. Not everyone listened to Jesus and Gautama Buddha, but the ramifications of what they discovered and said are still felt today by many. .. _`One Straw Revolution`: http://www.amazon.com/One-straw-Revolution-Masanobu-Fukuoka/dp/8185569312/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214456378&sr=8-1 .. _`Amazing Grace`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace .. _`Color of the bikeshed`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed ---- :Author: Lars Hasselblad Torres :Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:36:19 PDT :Modified: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:37:33 PDT fwiw, i've always loved joseph campbell's observation, something about how the western mind is the equivalent of a boulder, and thought systems of the east something like rock hammmers, developed for much smaller egos. and so the there is something of a fundamental mismatch between the thought patterns of the east and those of the west. to wit: the eastern "ego" is far more interdependent (perhaps "identity" more mutually dependent on, say, community?), and thus for such systems of thought to truly guide and shape us, we must first "undevelop" our egos. reminds me of ivan illich, and "deschooling society." i wonder how that all works - whether it is correct, and helpful in this context. interesting to read through these strands and get a peek at everyone's inner and daily lives. thanks for sharing linda! ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:27:36 PDT :Modified: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:29:16 PDT I have been here for most of 10 years now and each day I face more and more examples of how little I understand about this culture. My life has been preoccupied for the past few weeks with dealing with the implications of these differences. Copying is endemic in Thai culture. I know two respected academics who plagiarized their Master's theses. I can sometimes imagine that if you removed cheating in Thai culture that the whole system would collapse. Students copy answers because to admit that they don't understand to the teacher is insulting to the teacher and implies that the teachers are incapable. Teachers do nothing about the copying in part because the classes are just too large to try to deal with it. The corruption problem in Thailand is at this point in time almost legendary. And there are more and more people who are recognizing the problem of it - ridding the country of corruption is what is driving all of the demonstrations happening here now. But somehow corruption is only a problem on the part of the people buying votes and only a problem with powerful people taking bribes. They somehow do not see the equivalence of the act of the rich person taking a bribe for a favor and the farmer taking 500 baht for his vote. They don't see the corruption involved in allowing teachers to slack off and not teach in class but run tutoring centers after school and then teach their students. "Pay me extra and I will teach you in the after school-school what I should be teaching you as a function of my job." Rule of law? Forget it. The law is not enforced most of the time. My Faculty has in the past few years established itself with goals lifting honesty and diligence. In part because most of the western teachers in our program won't tolerate the cheating and because of this new emphasis, a faculty academic misconduct policy was written and announced. There are only two of us who have implemented it to the point of enforcing it. 3 weeks ago I caught 24 of the 29 students in my class copying either from the internet or from each other. I had every one of them documented. I issued their first warnings. It is a strong policy and because of that, I brought in the director of the program to speak to them in Thai so that there was no doubt that they understood the implications of their actions. They all signed the warning letters and apologized for cheating and said they would never do it again. The Thai faculty led me to believe that I was over the edge and being unfair and harsh. I was hurt by the lack of faculty support and considered carefully what I would do if any of the students in my class committed the second violation. The second violation means that I recommend that they be removed from the University. Earlier this week I informed the Dean that if that eventuality happened, and I did not have faculty support on enforcing its own policy, I would resign effective immediately. This was a radical decision to come to. 1) There is no one on faculty to finish teaching he classes I am teaching short of the Dean coming in and finishing the semester himself. 2) It will mean that I have no place to live - effective immediately- and that I have 7 days to either get a new position or leave the country. It was particularly drastic as both the dean and I were fairly confident that there would be at least one student who would cheat before the end of the semester. Yesterday afternoon I was grading and got about half way through the homework and had 2 students who had copied definitions from the internet for a question that they were told had to be in their own words. So badly I wanted to be wrong. The whole thing with the political demonstrations right now are similar. Rather than deal with the wrong doings of the current administration through the rule of law and proper channels, they want to force another coup and military take-over to oust the democratically elected (albeit, likely with bought votes) administration. They can't see that the problem is primarily and most importantly with the system and somehow think to address that is disrespectful of someone. I'm sorry. I think sometimes it is important to call a cheat a cheat and when something is bad, face up to it and get about fixing it. I might need someplace to stay before the end of the week. Anyone have a refrigerator box I can live in? **EDIT** My blood pressure is out of control and the doctor wants to know why? ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:36:36 PDT (((Linda))) Eek, in my mind I'm trying to think a way out of this mess. That is not at all helpful to you. But at least want to tell you that I care for you. ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:38:05 PDT Sorry it's been so rough. I'd have a hard time too. Curious, does the Thai culture (on the whole) have any real respect or appreciation for innovation, creativity and thinking outside the box? ---- :Author: John Powers :Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:38:16 PDT There is a cultural aspect to this, but I don't think that's the total foundation. I'm pretty typically American and my instincts are to finesse this. So part of my thinking is how to make the story of "finesse" not cheating. I'm not making light, dear Linda, only trying to be honest. I do know your resolve, so I'm not expecting that things will not transpire just as you predict. Still, I hope you'll consider options carefully. ---- :Author: Lars Hasselblad Torres :Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:09:14 PDT sorry it continues to be rough. when i taught, i tried to help shift my student's mindset away from, "getting the work done," to "learning something." i didn't really care if they'd cheated; i cared whether they learned something. so when i had doubts, we'd sit down and talk about sources, personal insight or reflection (ie, what's your contribution to the answer), and whether their current approach was helping them learn. if they just wanted to pass the class, and didn't care much for the subject (about 1/5 of the time) then i'd write it off. if they cared, which i knew most of them did, we had something to build up from the next time. not sure what its like in thailand, but from my years in malaysia, i remember how important getting to trust, so that we could just talk, was... good luck there. glad you have the bright spots like "Boy" and others. ---- :Author: Mark Grimes :Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:24:40 PDT Good thoughts John and Lars. ---- :Author: R.O. :Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:57:51 PDT My post and the only post on this thread translated into a kind of a switch. i do not know how that might have contributed to the subject of the thread cos I have not followed it since John pointed to me articles I should read and I have not actually managed to do so due to my resources constraints, indeed, as I did note, the thread is subtle. ---- :Author: Lars Hasselblad Torres :Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:44:57 PDT btw Linda, if you needed a place to stay in Vermont or Cambridge (US), you'd certainly be welcome to more than a refrigerator box! ---- :Author: Linda Nowakowski :Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:49:29 PDT I am taking a chance here and sharing a message I got from John. I feel certain that he will have no problems with my sharing and I haven't much time to post. ------------ --- John Powers wrote: Dear Linda, Do know that it is perfectly okay with me to not read this. Your dilemma is profound and in some way none of my business. Since you know Pittsburgh you can appreciate when I wonder whether my interest is nebby. There is something of gawking at a traffic accident to this. I mean very real harm to you is involved. That only intensifies the moral issues involved. And the starkness with which the moral question is presented makes it very attractive to me. I want to look. Of course looking raises all sorts of moral questions, not the least of which is loving you and not wanting harm to befall