Thursday
...Like Believing in the Postman
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They know that the gods exist, of course.
They even deal with them occasionally.
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But they don't believe in them.
They know them too well.
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It would be like believing in the postman."
Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
Wednesday
Emotional Health In Down Times: 5 Steps To Staying Positive And Productive
In these troubled economic times, when everywhere you look there's more and more evidence of how bad it is "out there," we have to remember that how successful you are and how peaceful or distressed you are is a result of what you focus your attention on. Remember that fear is self-created by focusing on something in the future that hasn't happened yet.
A student in a recent seminar had been living in fear for the last year that he would lose his house. His family is still in that house. Every single minute of fear that they were experiencing was self-created by imagining being thrown out of their home. The truth of the moment is they were safely in their home. Stop imaging the worst and focus on your own personal present reality. Even if you are unemployed, you are still alive, still living somewhere. Focus on what you do have, and be grateful for it, rather than on some future negative scenario that has not happened yet. A wonderful acronym for fear is Fantasized (future) Experiences Appearing Real. Turn off CNN (Constantly Negative News) and turn on your own inner movie of that which you want to create in your life. Live from your vision, not some externally created "reality" piped into your brain by the media. Look for the positive in your life and celebrate it.
Here are 5 more things to keep in mind that will help you keep your emotional wellbeing in check no matter what's going on:
1. Keep Dreaming Big. Don't let your inner critic inhibit you from dreaming big. As soon as you commit to a big dream, visualize it daily, and really go after it, your subconscious creative mind will come up with big ideas to make it happen. It will also help you to problem solve your way through challenges and create positive outcomes beyond your temporary struggles. As you continue to dream big, you'll start attracting the people, resources, and opportunities you need into your life to weather any storms and make your dreams come true. Big dreams not only inspire you, but they also help you to get through tough times and put certain things into perspective. And remember this, it doesn't take any more time or effort to dream a big dream than a small dream. So if you are going to dream anyway, dream big.
2. Believe in Yourself. If you are going to be successful in maintaining your emotional health and creating the life of your dreams, you have to believe that you are capable of making it happen. Make the decision to believe that you create all your experiences--both your successes and your failures.
3. Stop Complaining. As you commit to believing in yourself, also make a commitment to toning down the blame and complaint department. Look at who you are blaming and what you are complaining about. I'm fat. I'm tired. I can't get out of debt. I won't ever get another job (or a better job). I can't stand the relationship I have with my father. I'll never find a soulmate in life. The economy is to blame. My spouse is the cause of my unhappiness. My boss is ruining my life. Really examine your blaming and your complaining. More than likely, you can do something about them. They are not about other people, other things, or other events. They are about YOU. Decide what you want, and create a plan to get it.
4. Turn Paranoia on It's Head. Imagine how much easier it would be to succeed in life if you were constantly expecting the world to support you and bring you opportunity. Successful people do just that. Don't assume the world is a brutish, unwelcoming, and a difficult place to be. Try thinking the opposite! And turn paranoia inside out.
5. Use Affirmations to Build Self-Confidence. One of the most powerful tools for building worthiness and self-confidence is the repetition of positive statements until they become a natural part of the way you think. Create a list of 10 to 20 statements that affirm your belief in your worthiness and your ability to create the life of your dreams. Here are some examples of affirmations that have worked for others in the past:
- I am worthy of love, joy and success.
- I am smart.
- I am loveable and capable.
- I can create anything I want.
- I am able to solve any problem that comes my way.
- I can handle anything that life hands me.
- I have all the energy I need to do everything I want to do.
- I am attracting all the right people into my life.
No matter how well you plan and how well you execute your plan, you are bound to meet with disappointments, adversity and failure along the way to your ultimate triumph. Adversity is what gives you the opportunity to develop your inner resources of character and courage. Adversity is a great teacher. It will test you and make you stronger, but you have to hang in there and not give up!
More than 4,000 years ago in China, Confucius wrote: "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
Healthcare Reform & Game Theory
Health Care as a Complex Adaptive System
(by Joe Flower, from TheHealthCareBlog.com)
You want healthcare reform. I want healthcare reform. Grandma Jenkins wants healthcare reform.
What is healthcare reform? What kind of animal are we talking about? How would we recognize it if it came up and bit us? What are its markings, its behavior, its habits?
From observing the systems of other countries, from the results of local experiments and variations in the U.S. system, and from serious research over decades into outcomes and comparative effectiveness, we can actually outline what the marks of a better healthcare system would be.
But healthcare in the United States is a complex adaptive system. If we want to capture it fully, we have to take one step back and revisit what we know about the nature of complex adaptive systems and how that knowledge might apply to reform of this system.
Healthcare is complex. It has many inputs and outputs which operate independently upon one another in multiple overlapping feedback loops. Device manufacturers, for instance, adjust their costs and prices to reimbursement levels, and reimbursement levels are set to prevailing price structures. Preventive diabetes services, such as relatively inexpensive nutrition education, are under-compensated, and so are scarce; this leads to a need for more expensive services such as emergency treatment of diabetic shock and amputations.
All dynamic systems adapt continually. The various players (pharmaceutical companies, providers, health plans, consumers, employers, regulators, politicians) optimize their positions as much as they can with the resources they have access to (mostly money, but also other proxies for money, power, and positional security, such as votes, public sentiment, access to media, and systemic inertia). This is normal. This is how systems work.
This is also why our healthcare system, in almost universal judgment, is so dysfunctional. It has been optimized to the convenience and profit of the players with the greatest resources. All systems are in some sense self-righting: If the pikes eat up all the trout, then the pikes die off; without many pikes around, the trout proliferate until the pikes make a comeback, gorging on the trout. But in this case the healthcare system is dragging down the economy with its expense, and causing enormous personal economic misfortune, bankruptcy, misery, and death in the population. Waiting for it to right itself (or expecting that it will do so before causing ever-widening suffering and destruction) is a mug’s game.
Healthcare as a game
The healthcare industry in the United States is, in game theory terms:
• Both competitive and cooperative
• Multi-player
• Non-zero-sum - you don’t have to make others lose in order to “win”
• Infinite - with no end point, it is more like the stock market than football or chess
This infinite game has been a reasonably stable system, with each player performing his expected part (though often grumbling that he is not well served) because it has been, in game-theory terms, a near-perfect Nash equilibrium, a kind of strategic gridlock in which no player could benefit from any unilateral change in strategy and, in fact, would usually be punished for it. A doctor who decided unilaterally to spend more time with each patient, a pharmaceutical company which unilaterally lowered its prices, even a hospital which managed to reduce its re-admit rate, or a hospital CEO who decided to forego a shiny new edifice and focused instead on re-engineering processes – all would be punished economically and professionally for doing what we, their ultimate customers, would like them to do.
However, the system is now showing symptoms of increasing instability, as various players perceive that they are doing so poorly at the game that a change in strategy might, in fact, benefit them. This includes doctors who opt out of the insurance payment system or set up “concierge” practices or open urgent-care centers; patients who go to foreign countries for care, buy pharmaceuticals over the Internet, or opt out of the medical system entirely because they can’t afford it; and hospitals like Geisinger who set up their own insurance system, hire doctors, bundle products, and give warranties. Players that show little interest in major new strategies, such as pharmaceutical companies, health plans, and device manufacturers, are signaling that they feel that they are “winning” at the game as currently played – or at least that they feel that they are doing better than they would under any other strategy that they can see. Players attempting to quit the game or change the rules are signs that the game is breaking down.
The local optimization of players in a Nash equilibrium does not mean that the current strategic gridlock is actually the best for all concerned. There might well be some different configuration in which all parties are better off. But they can’t get there from here without some interruption of the system from outside, some influx of new energy (like, for instance, new funding), some new players (like, say, a government-sponsored “safety net” insurance program), some shift in the resources of the existing players (like consumers or employers being given greater information and power to choose).
What seeing health care as a system means
In practical, everyday terms, this point of view – seeing healthcare as a complex adaptive system capable of analysis in terms of game theory - renders some useful observations and rules of thumb for evaluating any possible healthcare reform. They include:
- You get what you pay for (and the inverse, if you don’t pay for it, you don’t get it). Stick a scoop into the healthcare soup, and you’ll find dozens of examples, but here’s one: Give pay-for-performance (PFP) bonuses for specific measures (number of diabetes patients getting eye exams, for instance) and that measure will improve. Other measures will not improve and may, in fact, decline as resources are shifted to improving the specified measures. The assumption that PFP bonuses will cause a general increase in quality has proven generally unfounded.
- The Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme: To the closest approximation, all the most important consequences of any given scheme will be the unintended ones. Example: Charging customers co-pays. Intended consequence: Cut casual over-utilization, recreational surgeries, whine-on-demand hypochondriacal office visits. Actual consequence: Cut all minor utilization including preventive checkups, pap smears, mammograms and so forth, thereby actually increasing major utilizations for the big things that the checkups didn’t catch; also cause some people to forego truly necessary treatment (chemotherapy, cardiac catheterization) and simply die rather than impoverish their families.
- Controlling specific costs and utilizations becomes a game of Whack-A-Mole. Example: Control length of stay and other in-patient cost structures, and suddenly you get lots of drive-through surgeries (“You want fries with that hip?”), until those come under control as well. Try to control pharmaceutical costs by refusing to reimburse for over-the-counter drugs, and suddenly there is a prescription version of ibuprofen, same stuff just twice as strong so that it can be reimbursed. This is the adaptive part of a complex adaptive system. The system perceives proscriptive regulation as damage and routes around it.
- Systemic decisions reflect the needs and desires of the individual decision-makers, not the system as a whole, or even the sectors within the system. If you want to understand hospitals’ strategic plans, for instance, you have to ask yourself how hospital CEOs make a living, what enhances their career prospects and what gives them more prestige and job security. The same is true of pharmaceutical company executives, doctors, health plan executives, consumers, legislators – anyone making a decision. Those needs and desires may line up with the needs of their sector, or with the needs of their customers or payers or constituents, or they may not. If they don’t, the needs of their sector or their community or their customers or constituents become just about perfectly irrelevant.
- Don’t expect anyone to "do the right thing." They just won’t. It is close enough to the real case to say that they can’t, if they are punished for doing so. So don’t design any part of the system on the assumption that the various actors will do the right thing. Sure, in every profession there are people who swim upstream of the flood of incentives and do what is right by the people they ultimately serve, even to their own detriment. These people are heroes of healthcare. But heroes are rare, and their appearance is unpredictable. Any part of a system designed for heroes to step forward and sacrifice themselves will fail. In aggregate, expect the decision-makers in any sector to act in their own personal best interest.
This lesson has stood out vividly in the current financial crisis: Deregulators felt that bankers and other financiers would regulate their own behavior and do what would be prudent for their institution, their sector, and their customers. Instead, they fairly uniformly did what brought them the biggest salaries, stock options, and bonuses.
However obvious it is to an outsider what "the right thing" should be in another person’s situation, it is not at all obvious to that person. The surgeons doing the thousands of unhelpful spinal fusion surgeries, the doctors ordering the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary images, the health plans cutting off chemotherapy to people whom they have managed to re-define as ineligible – we can come up with lots of psychological and sociological characterizations of their motives. But the simplest explanatory principal is Upton Sinclair’s dictum: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
There are probably many other rules of thumb that we could list here, but we could start with these. With a systems point of view in mind, we can turn to possible healthcare reforms and ask: What would be the markers of a healthcare system that would truly work?
Saturday
The Power of Stillness
Most Field training students understand stillness as that fertile starting point of practice characterized by the self-evident, inner apperception of one’s own being.
The inner stillness, however, is only one form that stillness takes in our practice, the aim of which is alignment—that state of friendly agreement between desire and belief—and not manifestation, as it is typically in the popular approaches to the subject of consciousness-as-cause.
Another profoundly useful application of stillness lies simply in not reacting to things. Of this, the ancient Tao Te Ching states, “The sage cannot be beaten, because he does not contend."
In a more modern rendering, the renowned metaphysician Florence Scovel Shinn writes, “I do not move, so the situation moves.”
In other words—and this can be a revelation in practice—the reactions that seem to us all but second nature in this or that situation really are choices, and we are free to choose the stillness of non-reaction instead at any time.
The effect of making this choice often startles others, and can be powerfully transformative.
Simply by choosing to remain still and unreactive in the face of some factual invitation that previously we might have allowed to upset us, we may find the situation coming right on its own with a remarkable efficiency. Such stillness has the power to elicit or reveal the truth, calm the ruffled spirit of others, disclose a way on when no way is apparent, and many other benefits.
Of course, given a lifetime of reacting, we may find the stillness option difficult at first. The things that are worthwhile often are difficult at first—which is why we talk in terms of “practice.
” With practice, we find that the flashpoint of reaction slows down. Stillness gains entry to the moment and works its magic.
And this magical moment, the moment in which we wake up and see that we can refrain from agreeing with unwanted facts—even this much—opens doors where there were none a moment before.
Technorati Tags: Field Center, Consciousness, Metaphysics, Reality
Planting the Seeds
Woodstock at Forty
By PAUL KRASSNER
Along with 499,999 others on a countercultural pilgrimage 40 years ago, I was heading for the Woodstock Festival of Music & Love. I was wearing my yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time. In one of the pockets there was a nice little stash of LSD. If you happen to be brand-name conscious, then you’ll want to know that it was Owsley White Lightning.
The CIA originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but, without anybody’s permission, millions of young people had already become explorers of their own inner space. Acid was serving as a vehicle for deprogramming themselves from a civilization of sadomasochistic priorities. A mass awakening was in process. There was an evolutionary jump in consciousness.
The underground press was flourishing, and when LSD was declared illegal on October 10, 1966, the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle became politicized while the radical Berkeley Barb began to treat the drug subculture as fellow outlaws. Acid was even influencing the stock market. Timothy Leary let me listen in on a phone call from a Wall Street broker who thanked Leary for turning him onto acid because it gave him the courage to sell short.
As I wandered around the Woodstock Festival, I was overwhelmed by the realization that this tribal event was in actuality what the Yippies had originally fantasized about for Chicago. No longer did so many of these celebrants have to feel like the only Martians on their block. Now, extended families were developing into an alternative society before your very eyes. I had never before felt such a powerful sense of community.
The soundtrack was live, and the Hog Farm commune provided meals, servicing the largest Bed & Breakfast place in history. Actually, they had been hired to provide security. But to Hog Farm leader Hugh Romney, security meant cream pies and seltzer bottles. He planned to wear a Smokey Bear costume to warn people about putting out fires. This was not merely a three-day outdoor concert. This was a Martian convention. Or, as Abbie Hoffman called it, Woodstock Nation.
The political contingent was encamped in a huge red-and-white-striped tent christened Movement City. In the afternoon, a mimeograph machine was churning out flyers proclaiming that the outdoor concerts should be free. At night, several festival-goers were busy unscrewing the metal-wire fencing that had been put up during the day. Yippie Roz Payne was among them. She helped take down the No Trespassing sign and changed it into a sign that read Peoples Bulletin Board.
On an afternoon when Abbie, Roz and I took a stroll down Merchants Way, which led to the stage that was still being constructed, they took down the Merchants Way sign and put up a sign that read Ho Chi Minh Trail. Lights had not yet been strung up along the path, and as it got darker, we kept walking and stumbling until we got lost in the woods. After a couple of hours, we saw a light through the trees, realized that we were right back where we started, and we laughed ourselves silly.
Abbie would get serious later on, though, ebbed on by his sense of justice and fueled by the tab of White Lightning that we had each ingested. While The Who were performing, he went up on stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for the possession of two joints; that this was really the politics behind the music.
Before Abbie could get his message across, Peter Townshend transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed him on the head with a swift backhand. Townshend had assumed that Abbie was just another crazed fan. When The Who played at Fillmore East the previous week, a plainclothes cop rushed on stage and tried to grab the mike. He intended to warn the audience that there was a fire next door and the theater had to be cleared, but he was able to do so only after Townshend kneed him in the balls.
Now he shouted at Abbie, “Get the fuck off my stage!” To the audience: “The next person that walks across the stage is going to get killed.” The audience laughed. “You can laugh, but I mean it!”
I inadvertently ended up with a political mission of my own at Woodstock. For a while, I was hanging around the Press Tent, which later turned into the Hospital For Bad Trips. A reporter from the New York Daily News asked me, “How do you spell braless?” I replied, “Without a hyphen.” He pointed out two men with cameras who were from the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Army.
And a free-lance writer who knew someone with a source in the White House told me how the Nixon administration had assigned the Rand Corporation think tank to develop a game plan for suspending the 1972 election in case of disruption. I decided to mention this at every meeting I attended, every interview I did, every campus I spoke at and every radio show that I was a guest on.
A year later, the story was officially denied by Attorney General John Mitchell. He warned that whoever started that rumor ought to be “punished.” I wrote to him and confessed, but he never answered my letter. Actually, investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum was able to trace the “rumor” back and discovered that I was the fifth level down from the original White House source. I believed it to be true, and even rented a tiny one-room apartment I could escape to when martial law was declared. It had a fireplace so that if the power went off I could cook brown rice.
My favorite moment at the festival was Jimi Hendrix’s startling rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His guitar wailing of our national anthem brought me to tears. It was a wordless version of what I interpreted to mean, “It’s not that we hate America, it’s that we feel the American dream has been betrayed, and we will live our alternative.” On the other hand, my least favorite moment was when I discovered that my new yellow leather fringe jacket had been stolen from the Movement City tent.
The ’60s were coming to an end, and the quality of co-option would not be strained. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” became a slogan for the Bank of America, and later for Total breakfast cereal. More recently, Tampax advertised its tampon as “Something over 30 you can trust.
Hippies became freaks. Negroes became blacks. Girls became women. Richard Alpert became Baba Ram Dass. Hugh Romney became Wavy Gravy, and his wife, Bonnie Jean, became Jahanarah. Yippie organizer Keith Lampe became Ponderosa Pine. My sister Marge became Thais. San Francisco Oracle editor Allen Cohen became Siddartha and moved to a commune where everybody called him Sid. They thought his name was Sid Arthur.
But the seeds that were planted then continue to blossom now. The spirit of Woodstock continues to be celebrated at such annual events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, Earthdance, the Oregon Country Fair, the Starwood Neo-Pagan Festival, Pete Seeger's Clearwater Festival, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, and the electronic magic montage of musicians and singers around the globe performing "Stand By Me" on YouTube.
Paul Krassner edited Pot Stories For Soul, available at paulkrassner.com.
Monday
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
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When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
-- Walt Whitman--
As You Put Light Around Yourself...
A very powerful use of light isor cocoon of light around you,
which extends above your head
Do not think of light as a protection,but as an energy that is so strong
it raises the vibration of everything around you.
a feeling of strength, harmony, and love.
When you surround yourself with light,
you do not have to build a wall around you to keep things out.
Your light will transform everything around you into a
higher vibration.
You raise your vibration when you surround yourself
with the image of light.
that others around you can pick up.
Not everyone is capable of responding to your higher vibration,---
and centered,
and will find it easier
to keep your heart open
and be compassionate
and loving.
(Sanaya Roman)
Friday
High Speed Rail: The Next Industrial Revolution?
A national high-speed rail network up and running by 2030. Yes we can? (image courtesy of USHSR)
President Obama strongly supports high-speed rail, environmentalists are behind it (well, at least some of them) and the Federal Railroad Administration is already reaching out to other countries that have had success with it. High-speed rail looks like it's going to happen. The question now is what kind of system will be built - how extensive, how fast and how integrated?
Last week, a new organization was founded which aims to help answer those questions. The US High Speed Rail Association, based in Washington DC, plans to lobby for a state of the art rail system that covers the entire country and provides service on par with the most advanced systems in the world. It has already unveiled its vision for high-speed rail in America - a significantly more ambitious vision than what has been floated by the Administration in Washington thus far.
"Our main objective is to organize the industry and to build public and political support for a nationwide high-speed rail network, built within 20 years," USHSR President and CEO Andy Kunz told TreeHugger. "We see this as the next industrial revolution in America and our chance to convert our country to true sustainability and prosperity."
The organization's first move was to unveil a map showing what a complete national system, built in 4 phases and completed by 2030, would look like (see map above; for the animated version, click here).
The map bears a certain resemblance to the "Vision for High-Speed Rail in America" unveiled by the Obama Administration in April. Both are based on the same 10 regional corridors, but USHSR's plan seriously raises the bar. Calling for 17,000 miles of track, multi-modal stations and travel speeds of 220mph, the proposal bears a greater resemblance to rail maps in Europe.
USHSR plans to generate support for the plan and help advance the rail industry in America by organizing a series of public events and conferences (the first one is scheduled for October 22-23 in Washington DC). A partnership with the International Union of Railways in Paris has also taken shape, and USHSR plans on hosting tours of European and Asian high-speed rail systems in the future.
Said Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, Director General of the International Union of Railways and a member of USHSR's Advisory Board:
“The ambitious plan recently publicized by President Obama in the framework of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act announces a fascinating time for railway development in America. A competitive high performance railway system – including a large network of high speed links – will constitute one of the pillars of US policies for transportation and sustainable development.”
Wednesday
See the Good
There was a great spiritual master, Kirpal Singh, who taught, among many other wonderful things, that we ought to see the good in situations and especially in each other. His philosophy emphasized the family of humankind. Even in situations where someone may be falling short of our expectations or ideas about how they should be, he emphasized seeing the good, recognizing whatever might be there that could be appreciated and valued in its own right.
Seeing is creative. Indeed, the etymological root of the word eye also is found in the word fountain, suggesting that our gaze upon something showers it with our vision, so that our seeing, far from being something passive, interacts creatively with the thing seen. 
To see the good, then, is to invite the good, to bring it forth, to summon it into expression. What we see always reflects who we have chosen to be. As Field training teaches, identity is creative.
This week, if you’re willing, consider looking at some problem differently. Try seeing the good, and watch what happens. Undertaken earnestly, it can have a profound and dramatic effect. Such seeing can work like a key to open our closed heart, and even the closed hearts of others.
Technorati Tags: Field Center, Consciousness, Metaphysics, Reality