Gumption

The Dalai Lama and the Reflectance and Resonance of Greatness, Understanding and Humility

His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, is in Seattle this week. I don't know if I'll get a chance to see him, personally - I've just returned from Florence, Italy (CHI 2008), with a really bad cold - but I just read a report by Ward Serrill in The Seattle Times on connecting Eye-to-Eye with the Dalai Lama when he first arrived in town that resonated deeply with me:

We don't speak a word. As he moves in front of me, my hands involuntarily reach out to grasp his. As our hands meet he looks up into my eyes and my world stops spinning. His eyes reveal a deep gravity. I see the serious work behind his childlike humor and spontaneity. The man has suffered much and discipline has made him into a spiritual warrior. This is serious work, these eyes tell me, this inner work to discover peace and being.

His attention is riveted. In this moment he is not a busy spiritual leader but simply a human looking gravely into the eyes of another. In this moment I see his greatness. It is this:

Humility is not a discipline; it is not a practice with him. Humility is simply what he is. I see in this moment of eyes meeting that he is incapable of placing himself above or below me. I am stunned by the reality of our equality.

And then he is gone, swept out of the room by his handlers. For the next three hours I am nearly incapable of speaking, stunned as I was with the presence of this understanding.

Ward's experience reminded me of the altered states and magnetic attraction of awakened people I experienced at Pop!Tech 2007, which had, in turn, reminded me of some earlier reports of this kind of high-resonance experience:

I was also reminded of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's observations in her audiotape, Your Heart's Prayer - which I'd earlier projected onto the practice of unfolding through blogging - about people who come into contact with spiritually enlightened individuals, such as Mahatma Ghandi the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa, likening the experience to what happens when two tuning forks coming into proximity of each other: the strong vibration of the spiritually enlightened person transmits energy to any other person that comes near.

[Having just listened again to the passage, I've amended a memory / transcription error in the original post above ... all the more apt because Oriah had actually referred to the Dalai Lama not Ghandi.]

As I have continued to reflect on how highly enlightened people have such a great impact on us, I am reminded of Don Miguel Ruiz' insights into the ways that people act as mirrors for us - enabling us to better see who we really are ... and/or what we could be. As he notes in the introduction to The Four Agreements, where he relates the enlightenment of a Toltec man:

He had discovered that he was a mirror for the rest of the people, a mirror in which he could see himself. "Everyone is a mirror", he said. He saw himself in everyone, but nobody saw him as themself. And he realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are. They couldn't see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors. And that wall of fog was made by the interpretations of light - the Dream of humans.

I would expand this to claim that highly enlightened people act as highly reflective mirrors for us. When we encounter highly enlightened individuals, there is less fog in the local atmosphere, and so we are thus better able to see the light in ourselves being reflected back more clearly.

Ward had made earlier comments in the Seattle Times on developing his film, The Heart of the Game, that further resonate with all of this:

"I am in awe of the journey right now," said Serrill. "It really is a labor of love that's gotten bigger than me. It's really opening its own doors right now."

Although I have not yet seen the film, Ward's comments suggest that he is not a stranger to greatness, understanding and humility, himself, and I would not be surprised if his film acts as an agent of reflection and resonance for others.

And I can't help but reflect on my last post - Do YouJustGetMe? Do I Even Get Myself? - and wonder how well highly enlightened individuals might score on guessing or being guessed in a personality test. [And, reflecting on humility, I wonder if the subtitle to that post should have been "Can I Even Get Over Myself?"] Somehow, though, these ideas regarding reflectance and resonance suggests that there may be a deeper level - perhaps deeper than western science can effectively probe - than guessing or being guessed. That the ultimate goal is simply to understand and accept ourselves, exactly as we are ... and to mirror that understanding and acceptance to others.

Amy, who cut out the article for me while I was away, just pointed out her favorite passage, which resonates with all of this, and aligns closely with our own view(s) of religion ... and humanity:

When asked about his [Dalai Lama's] religion of kindness, he replies, "... all these things: compassion, charity, patience, forgiveness, joy; these do not belong to religion. One does not need religion to understand or practice them. They are simply the expressions of what it is to be human."

[Update: having mistakenly attributed Oriah's remarks as referring to Ghandi rather than the Dalai Lama, I decided to go back for a more attentive listening of the passage in Your Heart's Prayer (Side 2b, about 18 minutes in), during which I saw the further connection that involved another filmmaker. I transcribe the passage as attentively and faithfully as I can, below:

I had a dream a number of years ago, this was after I'd heard a couple of stories about people being deeply affected by being in proximity to the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa. One was the story of a man who was a friend of a friend, and he happened to be somewhere where the Dalai Lama was, and he wasn't particularly interested in hearing him speak, but for some reason, encountered him coming out of the lobby of the hotel. And the two of them spoke to each other and the two of them had this moment, and this man just felt this sense of incredible love and well-being in himself.

And another dear friend of mine who's made a film about Mother Teresa, talks about one of the first times she tried to talk to Mother Teresa about making the movie, and my friend, who is Ann Petrie, was on a bus with Mother Teresa, knelt down and had her sunglasses on, and mother Teresa flipped her sunglasses up, and Anne was ready to launch into the business of when can I film you, and Mother Teresa said to her "You're so tired, why don't you just stop for a minute?" And Anne had this experience of this sort of bolt of light going through the center of her body, not from Mother Teresa, but what she felt was really from God. And she had been in her own words a lapsed Catholic for many years.

So I had been hearing these stories, and I had a dream one night, where the grandmothers, who I mentioned earlier, said here is how it works: I saw an image of a glass cylinder filled with coarse salt, and then somebody poured a pink fluid, like colored water, into the container and it started to come up from the bottom up through the salt. And they said, this is what a person is like. The fluid being poured in is like their level of consciousness of who they really are, that what they are is a participant in this sacred life force, and the higher their level of awareness, two things happen: the more the salt dissolves, so the more there is a dissolving of all the structure of the identity that they think they are; and the other thing that happens is that everything becomes colored with this awareness. And when they are in proximity to someone else, because we're all made of the same stuff, it sets up a similar knowing in the other person.

So what people have a flash of when they are near someone who is very conscious of that Chui-ta-ka-ma, that life force energy that they are, is they experience the same thing in themselves. It's a little like bringing a tuning fork next to another tuning fork. So it's not so much they get an awareness of the other person being that divine life force but themselves.

The good news for me about this is that the task, then, is to just try to be with that awareness to the best of my ability, and that will create a ripple effect in ways that I can't even anticipate, because of the nature of our interbeingness. And it means we can have an enormous effect on the world by simply paying attention.]

Locked-in Syndrome: Diving Bells, Butterflies, Freedoms and Families

Amy and I recently saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or, more properly, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon), during an unexpected extended layover in San Francisco. The movie is about the late Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor of the fashion magazine Elle, who at age 43 suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed except for his left eye, after which he continued to suffer for the next 12 years from locked-in syndrome - aware and awake, but unable to communicate. Fortunately (at least for viewers and readers), a dedicated speech therapist (Henriette) was able to open up a new communication channel for him - through repeatedly reciting a frequency-sorted version of the alphabet and watching for him to blink his eye when she reached the desired letter - and a dedicated transcriber (Claude) was able to navigate this channel with him to help him get his story out. And that story is a powerful one, touching on the challenges he faced in dealing with his highly constrained condition, and its effects on his opportunities - past, present and future.

The diving bell in the title is an allusion to the restrictions imposed by his physical condition, while the butterfly refers to the relative freedom of his mental and imaginative capacities that he appreciated - and indulged - all the more after the stroke. What struck me most about the film was that we all suffer some degree of locked-in syndrome - unable (or, perhaps more often, unwilling) to communicate effectively with the people around us. I do not mean to imply for a moment that most of us suffer anything close to the incredible challenges Bauby faced, but the movie did offer me an opportunity to reflect on how often I underutilize communication channels in my own life (this blog notwithstanding).

I remember one time, at the beginning of a surgical procedure, I had been given anesthesia, but it had not yet taken [full] effect before someone started inserting a tube down my throat. I tried to alert the medical staff to the pain I was feeling during this part of the procedure, but was unable to move or talk, and the fear I felt about being so incapable of communicating my predicament was at least as painful as the insertion itself. This was a far more dramatic example of feeling locked-in than most of my experiences, in which I am able to communicate, but unable to effectively convey something I am thinking or feeling to another person ... or situations in which I consciously or unconsciously choose not to communicate at all.

Bauby, of course, could have also chosen not to communicate. It required far more effort for him - and for the people with whom he was communicating - than it typically does for me (and presumably, however ponderous my writing and speaking may be, for the people with whom I communicate), and his willingness to make that effort to not only communicate with the people around him in his activities of daily living but to dictate a book about his experience is inspiring. I was reminded of a Richard Bach quote,

Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours

as well as the lyrics to the Eagles song, Already Gone [video],

So oftentimes it happens that we live our lives in chains
and we never even know we have the key.

Another aspect of the film that moved me was Bauby's relationship with his children ... and their mother (Celine, to whom he was not married). After his stroke, his ability to interact with them was extremely limited, illustrated by a picnic on the beach, during which they play the word game hangman. Amy and I were watching the film on the eve of my "homecoming" - after having commuted nearly every week from Seattle to Palo Alto (or other business-related destinations) for 16 months - and so the lost opportunities for enjoying time with his children was especially poignant ... as was his continued underappreciation for Celine.

Bauby's relationship with his father was also very poignant (for me). Early in the movie, while Bauby is shaving his father (Papinou), his father expresses how proud he is of his son, which brought back memories of my own father expressing pride and approval - as best he could - for his son ... as well as more painful memories of him not expressing pride or approval ... for his son or himself. [In writing this, I'm struck by how my father suffered from a form of locked-in syndrome, tightly bottling up his emotions, which eventually started leaking out in various ways, shapes and forms.]  In my last conversation with him before he died - in 1996 - I was talking with him about the three job offers I had as I was nearing the completion of my Ph.D. One would have enabled me to continue working text-based information extraction; a second would have enabled me to work in the related area of speech interfaces; the third, which seemed both the most promising and the most challenging - what he called "the big job" - would have enabled me to work on something completely different. His last words to me were "Take the big job. You can do it!" I did take that big job - I felt the fear and did it anyway - but I never saw him [alive] again. Although I have many memories of episodes in which I did not receive much-desired approval (from him ... and other authority figures in my life), I'm glad to have the most recent - and lasting - memory be an example of explicit and enthusiastic approval.

During the shaving scene in the film, Bauby expands on this theme, noting "We all are children. We all need approval." Andrea Gronvall expands this theme even further, in her Chicago Reader review:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly inter-twines the need for validation—which is tied to the impulse to create—and the inevitability of isolation and death. Locked in, Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a luminous treatise on life and love, leaving behind a work of art that says “I was here and I mattered.” [Director Julian] Schnabel honors that impulse with this mature, resonant portrait of an artist.

This need for approval ... for validation ... for appreciation ... for mattering ... is something I continually struggle with. As I noted in an earlier post on living without a goal, and mattering without being useful:

I can't honestly say I'm entirely willing to release my attachment to others' [expressions of] appreciation at this moment -- despite the opportunities for practicing such detachment currently being offered me -- but I'm at least willing to re-open the question of whether and how I matter ... and if it is possible to matter without being [acknowledged as] useful to others.

And so I guess I'm still in the question ... perhaps locked-in to the question ... and in the current context, I'm wondering whether the answer - or the key - lies along the path of the butterflies.

An Inconvenient Truth, and a Call to Action

For Father's Day, our family went to see An Inconvenient Truth, a movie I wanted to see ... and wanted my children to see.  In the film, Al Gore poignantly highlights many of the disturbing impacts of global warming, including natural disasters, droughts, sea level rise, epidemic illnesses and species extinction.

Gore makes a compelling case for the need to take action, and identifies some of the factors that have impeded action, including denial, despair and disinformation (e.g., by George W. Bush's chief of staff for the Office of Environmental Quality -- and former oil lobbyist -- Phil Cooney ... the term "weapons of mass obfuscation" comes to mind).  He cites a survey in the journal Science on The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change which sampled 928 journal publications that dealt with "climate change" and found that none suggested there was any disagreement on whether human activities are negatively affecting the Earth's atmosphere.  A sample of newspaper and magazine articles found that 57%  suggested there was disagreement about whether humans were impacting global climate change ... reminiscent of another topic of great import in which many members of the press seemed to favor administration viewpoints over all others.  It seems as though we are living in a time of many inconvenient truths.

Gore argues that global warming is not simply an environmental or political issue, but a moral one, about which we have to take action ... and soon.  The film concludes with a number of actions we can take to reduce global warming, and he shows how the cumulative effects of the proposed actions can reduce CO2 emissions to below 1970 levels by the year 2050. 

Anyone who lives in Washington State can also take action by supporting renewable energy through signing the petition -- and/or collecting others' signatures -- for ballot initiative I-937.  Another action is to encourage others to see the film -- so if anyone is reading this, I recommend that you see this film ... and take [more] action(s)!

[Updates, 06-Jul-2006: Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press reported that the nation's top climate scientists are largely confirming the accuracy of the movie (Wikipedia has a more extensive entry detailing the facts), but President Bush has said he will not see the movie and his EPA Administrator, Steve Johnson, has not found the time to see it either ... not that this administration has shown a particular predilection for facts, especially not inconvenient ones.  My biggest concern about the movie is that only people who are already concerned about global warming will see it and/or be influenced by it.  A politically conservative friend of mine, who I otherwise have great respect for, said he wouldn't see the movie because he's heard it's "just fearmongering" ... which I find odd, given that the current administration traffics in fear, and he is a supporter.  My fear is that the increasing polarization of the American political landscape will diminish prospects for influencing anyone who doesn't already believe in the problem of global warming ... and it seems odd to even be referring to faith vs. reason on a topic about which so much science is known.

On a more positive note, we collected enough signatures to put the I-937 renewable energy referendum question on the Washington State November ballot!]

[Update, 2006-07-10: Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, has posted a blog entry on An Inconvenient Truth, entitled It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine, which includes a copy of his LA Times op-ed article on If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming.  The article lists four factors that make help explain why more people aren't more concerned about global warming:

• There is no human or group, e.g., a brutal dictator or evil empire, that is consciously trying to harm us
• Human societies have not, generally speaking, evolved moral rules about atmospheric chemistry (unlike, say, gay marriage)
• The negative impacts are too far in the future, and not generally perceived as a clear and present danger
• The changes are happening too slow for our brains to register (think: boiling frog)

Al Gore addresses the last three points in the film, but I don't believe that anyone would fill the role for the first point Dan Gilbert raises.  The impending harm is largely due to mass unconsciousness, and despite my misgivings about the numbers of people who aren't already conscious -- and concerned -- about global warming seeing the film, I do hope that Gore's film will help to promote consciousness and concern.  As Gilbert notes:

Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.  It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to new occasions.]

[Update, 2006-08-06: Much more eloquent pessimism about the prospects for Al Gore and his message in An Inconvenient Truth are provided at Whiskey Bar, which includes a broader range of threats:

But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.

Talk about inconvenient truths ...]

Failure, Persistence and Heroism

NPR's Morning Edition aired a segment this morning called "The Aftermath of Movie Flops", introduced by Steve Inskeep as "a chronicle of failure, [part of] a series on flops, about what happens when the next big thing isn't."  Kim Masters interviewed a number of movie people, who had some gems to share:

• Laura Zisken (producer of Hero): "You think about your failures, way longer and way more than you think about your successes."  [Reminding me of don Miguel Ruiz' observation in The Four Agreements that "The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake."]
• Akiva Goldsman (screenwriter for Batman & Robin): "The trick to a career is hanging on, it's just being stubborn enough to stay in the game."  [Substitute "getting a Ph.D." for "a career" and you have my view of what a Ph.D. really represents.]
• Judd Apatow (producer of Cable Guy, quoting Warren Beatty): "You never really know if you made a good movie for ten years."  [Interestingly, an IMDB comment on Cable Guy suggests at least one person considered this a good movie 8 years later.]

My favorite part of the segment, though, was an excerpt from Hero, in which the reporter, Gale Gayley (played by Geena Davis), asks John Bubber (played by Andy Garcia), "If everyone thinks of you as a hero, Mr. Bubber, how do you see yourself?"  Bubber answers

"I think we're all heroes, if you catch us at the right moment."

The End of Suburbia @ CHAC: Think Global, Live Local

I watched "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream" last night in the Lower Level of the Capitol Hill Arts Center, preceded by a presentation by Jake Perrine of the Art Institute of Seattle and followed by a discussion led by Eric Magnuson of Bainbridge Graduate Institute [there will be another screening, presentation & discussion there on August 24]. I've been increasingly questioning my suburban lifestyle since reading "The Great Good Place: Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community" by Ray Oldenburg; this movie ratcheted up the inquiry. The documentary film, which has been compared to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, focuses on the World Oil Peak, which is predicted to occur sometime during this decade (i.e., by 2010), after which point the supply of oil will decline, prices for oil -- and everything that depends on oil (which is nearly everything, at least in the USA) -- will rise and, according to the commentators in the film, significant economic, social and political upheavals will ensue. The film emphasizes the particularly harsh impact the post-peak changes will have on suburban lifestyles in this country, though clearly the entire population of the country (and world) will be adversely affected.

Bowling for Columbine: Fear & Loathing in America

While many people went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 this weekend, I finally got around to seeing Bowling for Columbine, the previous, Oscar-winning, documentary produced by Michael Moore. In the movie, Moore explores a number of possible explanations as to why there is so much more gun violence in the USA than in other countries, including the number of guns and exposure to various media (violent video games and music). Some of the oft-cited reasons do not appear very compelling on closer examination, e.g., it appears that we do not have more guns per capita or higher levels of exposure to violent games and music than other countries that enjoy much lower levels of gun violence. However, as highlighted in Moore's interviews with Barry Glassner, author of Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, we do have a much higher level of exposure to violent media via news reporters and politicians in this country, both of whom have much to gain (with respect to gaining attention, market share and/or votes) by promulgating a culture of fear among the population. I do not know yet how much Moore's new film focuses on the promulgation of fear, but I suspect we will see ever more fear-mongering as we approach the US presidential election. As a side note, I find it curious that there are so many people -- and web sites -- out to discredit Moore; I don't follow film (or other media) closely, but I'm surprised at this level of effort, and reminded of other efforts to discredit people who have expressed views not welcomed by the current administration.