What is a SHADOW?
The term "SHADOW" was first used by Carl G. Jung to describe the repressed or denied part of the Self. Robert Bly popularized this idea in A Little Book On The Human Shadow. Bly says that we were each born into a "360 degree personality." As infants we expressed the full circle of our human nature, without editing or censoring. As we grew up, however, we learned that certain slices of our 360 degree pie were unacceptable to the people around us. Maybe we were shamed for crying or punished for being angry. We may have been ridiculed for wanting attention or acting proud of ourselves. So, we learned to repress those slices of our pie. According to Bly, it was as if we threw them over our shoulder into a bag, which we've been dragging around behind us ever since.
Most of us have issues in the bag which slow us down in some area of our life. Some of us can barely move because we have so much in the bag. We define Shadow as everything we have stuffed into the bag. It may be "positive" parts or "hurtful" parts. The SHADOW is all those parts of ourselves we have split off, repressed, hidden away or denied.
How do I recognize my SHADOW?
You can identify your SHADOWS by looking at what you project onto others. When you deny a trait in yourself, you tend to be very aware of that trait in other people. This means that you are most alert to those traits in others which reflect your own SHADOWS. You may react irrationally to one of those traits in others which reflect your own SHADOWS. You may react irrationally to one of those traits in someone else, blowing things out of proportion. So, you can begin to identify your SHADOWS by looking at those things which annoy you in others. Another way to spot your SHADOWS is to look for things you find yourself doing by accident. No matter how hard you try to keep your bag sealed, your SHADOW may leak out in a way that seems beyond your control. For example you may promise yourself that you're going to spend more time with your family, yet it seems that you're spending more time at work. You may find yourself jumping from one self-defeating relationship to another. You may ignore your own rules about eating, drinking and smoking. When you repeat a pattern of behavior involuntarily, it may be a sign that your SHADOW is running your life!
You can also notice the traits which you admire the most in others. Who do you look up to? Who are your idols? We often project our GOLDEN SHADOWS onto others, and get stars in our eyes, because these people represent the qualities we have disavowed in ourselves out of a false sense of modesty. You could say that we paint other people with our SHADOWS, for better and for worse.
Copied from www.shadowhealing.com
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Breaking the Spell of Money
A brother from the MKP-Uk community sent me the link to an article called "Breaking the Spell of Money" written by Scott Russell Sander on www.orionmagazine.org
Read the copy underneath for yourself.
Breaking the Spell of Money
ANYONE WHO PAYS ATTENTION to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future.
So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. I would like to focus on a different one—our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth.
To grasp the impact of that confusion, think of someone you love. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements—oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on—you would end up with a few dollars’ worth of raw materials. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight.
Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone’s arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. We’d be likely to say that it’s not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound.
And yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world—as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction. Nothing in nature has been spared—not forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, nor any of the creatures that dwell therein. Nor have human beings been spared. Through its routine practices, this economy subjects people to shoddy products, unsafe working conditions, medical scams, poisoned air and water, propaganda dressed up as journalism, and countless other assaults, all in pursuit of profits.
When tobacco or pharmaceutical companies suppress research that shows their products are killing people, they may not single out particular human beings for execution, yet they deliberately sentence a large number of strangers to premature death. Likewise, when banks launder drug money, when the insurance industry opposes public health care, when the auto industry lobbies against higher fuel-efficiency standards, when arms manufacturers fight any restraint on the trade in guns, when agribusiness opposes limits on the spraying of poisons, when electric utilities evade regulations that would clean up smoke from power plants, when chambers of commerce lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they are just as surely condemning vast numbers of people to illness, injury, and death.
THE ECONOMIST MILTON FRIEDMAN stated flatly that “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” The second half of Friedman’s sentence would place a curb on the first half only in a universe where enterprises motivated entirely by greed never engaged in deception or fraud. This may have seemed like a possibility in the rarefied atmosphere of the Chicago School of Economics, where Friedman held sway and helped to shape the free-market ideology that has dominated American society in recent decades. But in the world where the rest of us live, deception and fraud have been commonplace among corporate giants, from Enron to Exxon, from United Fruit to Union Carbide. Consider a short list of recent malefactors: Halliburton, Philip Morris, WorldCom, Wachovia, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, Blackwater, Monsanto, Massey Energy, Tyco, HealthSouth, Wal-Mart, Global Crossing, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide Financial, AIG, and BP. These companies, and legions of others, have cooked the account books, misrepresented their financial condition with end-of-quarter window dressing, abused their employees, cheated their investors, sold lethal products, violated safety regulations, lied, bribed, swindled, or otherwise refused to stay within “the rules of the game.”
In our country, when the rules become a nuisance or do not sufficiently favor their interests, big companies purchase enough support in the White House or Congress or regulatory agencies to have the rules revised or abolished. Examples of this abuse could be cited from all industries, but none are more egregious than those in finance. Until the mid-1980s, the U.S. financial sector never accounted for more than 16 percent of all corporate profits, but over the past decade it has averaged more than 41 percent, and it has done so while contributing only modestly to social needs, chiefly through local banks and credit unions, and while doing a great deal of harm, chiefly through the creation and trade of financial paper. Most of the economic advisors for President Obama, as for President Bush, have come straight from Wall Street, and, not surprisingly, they have shaped government policy to benefit the biggest Wall Street firms and the richest investors. The global economic meltdown was largely a result of such rigging of the system, which freed commercial and investment banks, trading companies, and rating agencies to gamble recklessly with other people’s money.
In spite of the worldwide suffering caused by this casino capitalism, the financial reform bill passed by Congress in the summer of 2010 does little to rein it in. The managers of hedge funds, for example, have kept their operations essentially free of oversight, while preserving the loophole that treats their earnings as capital gains, taxed at 15 percent, rather than as regular income, which would be taxed in the top bracket at 35 percent. In 2009, when the CEOs of the twenty-five largest American hedge funds split over $26 billion, this cozy arrangement cost the Treasury, and therefore the rest of us, several billion dollars in lost tax revenue. When President Obama urged Congress to close this tax loophole, the billionaire chairman of one hedge fund responded by comparing such a move with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Now, why would a billionaire want more money, and why have some billionaires sought to increase their fortunes by purchasing television networks and newspapers, funding think tanks, hiring armies of lobbyists and propagandists, and setting up phony front groups, all to spread the gospel of no-holds-barred capitalism? You might say that such behavior is natural, because everybody wants more money. But consider: Suppose you keep a billion dollars under your mattress, where it will earn no income, and you set out to spend it; in order to burn through it all within an adult lifetime of, say, fifty years, you would have to spend $1.7 million per month, or $55,000 per day. If you took your billion dollars out from under the mattress and invested it in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at current rates, you could spend $40 million per year, or $110,000 per day, forever, without touching your capital. It so happens that $110,000 is a bit more than twice the median household income in the United States. If you do the math, you will find that the twenty-five hedge fund managers who pulled in $26 billion last year claimed an income equivalent to roughly 500,000 households, or some 2 million people.
What are Rupert Murdoch, David and Charles Koch, Adolph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and other billionaire advocates of unbridled capitalism after? They certainly are not worrying about sending their kids to college or paying their medical bills. Then what are they seeking? A psychiatrist might be better qualified to answer the question, but let me offer an amateur’s hunch, which arises from six decades of watching our legislatures, regulatory agencies, judiciary, public lands, mass media, and schools come under the influence, and often under the total control, of the richest Americans. What the free-enterprise billionaires are greedy for is not money but power, and not merely the power to take care of themselves and their families, which would be reasonable, but the power to have anything they want and do anything they want without limit, which is decidedly unreasonable. Anyone who has shared a house with a two-year-old or a fifteen-year-old has witnessed such a craving to fulfill every desire and throw off every constraint. Most children grow beyond this hankering for omnipotence. Those who carry the craving into adulthood may become sociopaths—incapable of sensing or caring for the needs of other people, indifferent to the harm they cause, reacting aggressively toward anyone or anything that blocks their will.
I’m not saying that all billionaires, or megamillionaires, are sociopaths. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett clearly aren’t, for example, for they are using their fortunes to serve the public good, including funding programs for those who dwell at the other end of the money spectrum. In June of 2010, Gates and Buffett invited the richest individuals and families in America to sign a pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of this writing, fifty-seven have accepted the invitation, including Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York; Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook; Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft; and Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Perhaps they have signed the pledge out of pure altruism. But I would like to believe they also understand that they themselves did not create their financial wealth, however skillful and hardworking they may be; they amassed their money by drawing on the efforts of countless people, living and dead; by drawing on public resources, such as schools and courts; by reaping the benefits of madcap bidding on the stock market; and by drawing on the natural resources of the planet. I would like to believe that, having derived their riches from the commons, they feel obliged to return a substantial portion of those riches for the benefit of the commons.
Whatever their motives, the signers of the Giving Pledge are following the example of Andrew Carnegie. Although he acquired his fortune by methods as ruthless as any employed by buccaneer capitalists today, having made his money, Carnegie gave it all away, except for a modest amount left to his family. We associate his name especially with the more than twenty-five hundred libraries he endowed, but he also funded many other public goods, including a university, a museum, and a foundation for promoting not free enterprise, but education and world peace. In an essay published in 1889 called “The Gospel of Wealth,” he argued that the concentration of great fortunes in the hands of a few was an inevitable result of capitalism, but also a dangerous one, because the resulting disparity between the haves and have-nots would cause social unrest. And so, he insisted, these great fortunes should be restored to society, either through philanthropy or through taxation.
In view of the current efforts, backed by many of the richest Americans, to abolish the estate tax, it is striking to read Carnegie’s view of the matter:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion.… Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.
That is not a passage you are likely to find cited by the Cato Institute, Free Enterprise Fund, Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth, or any of the other strident opponents of the federal estate tax, a tax that under current regulations affects only the richest 1 percent of Americans—the very citizens, by coincidence, who fund the Cato Institute, etc., etc.
Now let us return to pondering the richest of our fellow citizens who show no inclination to share their wealth, but rather seem intent on growing richer by hook or crook, regardless of the consequences for our democracy, the environment, or future generations. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, these individuals use their wealth only to increase their power, and use their power only to guard and increase their wealth, and so on, in an upward spiral toward infinity. Their success in this endeavor can be measured by the fact that the top 1 percent of earners now receives 24 percent of all income in the United States, the highest proportion since the eve of the Great Depression in 1929.
Giant corporations operate in a similar way, using their wealth to increase their power over markets and governments, and using their power to increase their wealth. When I say giant, I am not referring to retailers, banks, factories, or other firms that operate on a modest scale and in one or a few locations. I am referring to the behemoths of business. Of the one hundred largest economies in the world, more than half are multinational corporations. Exxon alone surpasses in revenues the economies of 180 nations. These gigantic empires, spanning the globe, answer to no electorate, move jobs and money about at will, keep much of their operations secret, and oppose any regulation that might cut into their profits. Thus, over the past several decades, Exxon has used its enormous might to oppose higher fuel-efficiency standards, to resist safety regulations that might have prevented the catastrophic oil spill in Prince William Sound, to push for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to thwart legislation aimed at controlling carbon emissions. In doing so, the managers of Exxon have simply obeyed the logic of capitalism, which is to maximize profIts regardless of social and environmental costs. Through trade organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute and numerous front groups, Exxon, Shell, BP, and other energy titans have spent millions of dollars trying to persuade the public that the climate isn’t shifting dangerously, or if it is shifting then humans play no part in the change, or if humans do play a part then nothing can be done about it without stifling the economy.
“Saving the economy” is the slogan used to defend every sort of injustice and negligence, from defeating health-care legislation to ignoring the Clean Water Act to shunning the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But should we save an economy in which the finance industry claims over 40 percent of all corporate profits and a single hedge fund manager claims an income equivalent to that of twenty thousand households? Should we save an economy in which the top 1 percent of earners rake in a quarter of all income? Should we embrace an economy in which one in ten households faces foreclosure, 44 million people live in poverty, and 51 million lack health insurance, an economy in which the unemployment rate for African Americans is above 17 percent and for all workers is nearly 10 percent? Should we defend an economy that even in a recession generates a GDP over $14 trillion, a quarter of the world’s total, and yet is supposedly unable to afford to reduce its carbon emissions? Should we serve an economy that represents less than 5 percent of Earth’s population and yet accounts for nearly half of world military spending? A reasonable person might conclude that such an economy is fatally flawed, and that the flaws will not be repaired by those who profit from them the most.
THE ACCUMULATION OF MONEY gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us. Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for things that do possess intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, nonprofits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn’t directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the very top. While the superrich often pretend to oppose government as an imposition on their freedom, they are usually great fans of government contracts, crop subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and other forms of corporate welfare, and even greater fans of military spending.
Among those who have grasped the link between U.S. militarism and the cult of money was Martin Luther King Jr. In a speech entitled “A Time to Break Silence,” delivered a year to the day before he was assassinated, King went against the counsel of his friends and advisors by denouncing the Vietnam War. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed like every U.S. military operation from the 1950s onward, the war in Vietnam was justified as an effort to promote freedom and democracy and to protect American security. What our military was actually protecting, King argued, were “the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” For saying so, he was denounced as a communist or socialist by newspapers and self-proclaimed patriots nationwide, just as President Obama has been denounced as a socialist for proposing national health care.
The slur is an old one, going back to the late nineteenth century when movements to organize unions or end child labor in factories or secure votes for women were decried as socialist by the robber barons and their henchmen in politics and journalism. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the labels communist and socialist have been used interchangeably by the superrich to condemn any cooperative efforts by citizens to secure basic rights or to serve common needs. These twin labels have been used to vilify the income tax, the estate tax, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, every major piece of environmental legislation, American participation in the UN, disarmament treaties, aid to the poor, humanitarian aid to other nations—any endeavor by government, in short, that might reduce the coffers or curb the power of those who sit atop the greatest heaps of capital.
That power is steadily increasing, as witness the Supreme Court’s decision in early 2010, by a 5-4 vote, in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, which holds that corporate funding of political broadcasts during elections cannot be limited. The majority based their argument on the twin claims, never mentioned in the Constitution, that corporations are entitled to be treated as persons under the law and that money is a form of speech, and therefore any constraint on spending by corporations to influence elections would be a denial of their right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. The decision means that our electoral process, already corrupted by big money, will fall even more under the sway of corporations and their innocuous-sounding front groups, such as “Citizens United.” The nearly unanimous view among the nation’s leading First Amendment scholars, voiced at a meeting in March of 2010, was that the case was wrongly decided. But the only five opinions that count are those of the judges in the majority, who were appointed to the Supreme Court by administrations that have benefited most handsomely from corporate financing.
MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator or monarch; that they are using this power to skew the game more and more in their favor; and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.
It is just as important that we shake off the spell of consumerism. In 1955, a retailing analyst named Victor Lebow bluntly described what an ever-expanding capitalism would require of us: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. The economy needs things consumed, burned, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” And so it has come to pass. Americans, by and large, have made consumption a way of life, and a prime source, if not of spiritual satisfaction, then of compensation for whatever else might be missing from our lives, such as meaningful work, intact families, high-quality schools, honest government, safe streets, a healthy environment, a nation at peace, leisure time, neighborliness, community engagement, and other fast-disappearing or entirely vanished boons.
Advertisers maintain the consumerist illusion by appealing to our every impulse, from lust and envy to love of family and nature. The estimates for annual spending on advertising in the U.S. hover around $500 billion. This is roughly the amount we spend annually on public education. While taxpayers complain about the cost of schools, they do not protest the cost of advertising, which inflates the price of everything we purchase, and which aims at persuading us to view the buying of stuff as the pathway to happiness. A current ad for Coke, showing a frosty bottle, actually uses the slogan “Open Happiness.” The promise is false, and all of us know it, yet we keep falling for the illusion. We can begin to free ourselves from that illusion by reducing our exposure to those media, such as commercial television and radio, that are primarily devoted to merchandising. We can laugh at advertising. We can distinguish between our needs, which are finite, and our wants, which are limitless. Beyond meeting our basic needs, money cannot give us any of the things that actually bring happiness—family, community, good health, good work, experience of art and nature, service to others, a sense of purpose, spiritual insight.
When we do spend money, so far as possible we should put it in the hands of our neighbors—local merchants, professionals, growers, craft workers, artists, chefs, and makers of useful things—and we should put as little as possible in the coffers of distant corporations and plutocrats, who know and care nothing about our communities. We should encourage efforts to restore local economies through small-scale manufacturing, sustainable agriculture and forestry, distributed energy generation, credit unions, public-access television and radio, nonprofits, and cooperatives. We should experiment with local currencies, as a number of cities across the U.S. have done. When possible, we should barter goods and services, avoiding the use of money altogether.
As a nation, we need to quit using the flow of money as the chief measure of our well-being. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is the dollar value of our nation’s economic output in a given period, without regard to the purpose of that output. So the cost of cleaning up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico adds to the GDP, as does an epidemic of cancer, a recall of salmonella-laced eggs, a bombing campaign in Afghanistan, lawsuits against Ponzi schemers, prison construction, and every other sort of ill. The GDP does not reflect work done at home without pay, volunteer work in the community, or mutual aid exchanged between neighbors. It counts junk food you buy on the highway but not food you grow in your backyard. It counts the child care you purchase but not the care you provide. If you lead a healthy life, you contribute little to the GDP through medical expenditures, but if you smoke, become addicted to drugs or alcohol, become dangerously obese, neglect your health in any way at all, you’re sure to boost the GDP. War also swells the GDP, but peacemaking does not. We need to devise measures of well-being that take into account the actual quality of life in our society, from the rate of incarceration (currently the highest in the world) to the rate of infant mortality (currently thirty-third in the world), from the condition of our soils and rivers and air to the safety of our streets.
One need not be an economist—as I am not—to see that our economic system is profoundly unjust in its distribution of benefits and damage, that it relies on violence toward people and planet, and that it is eroding the foundations of democracy. What should we do? Not as any sort of expert, but as a citizen, I say we need to get big money out of politics by publicly financing elections and strictly regulating lobbyists. We need to preserve the estate tax, for its abolition would lead to rule by an aristocracy of inherited wealth, just the sort of tyranny we threw off in our revolt against Britain. We need to defend the natural and cultural goods we share, such as the oceans and the internet, from those who seek to exploit the common wealth for their sole profit. We need to stop private-sector companies from dictating research agendas in our public universities. We need legislation that strips corporations of the legal status of persons. We need to restore the original definition of a corporation as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures. We need to enforce the anti-trust laws, breaking up giant corporations into units small enough to be answerable to democratic control. We need to require that the public airwaves, now used mainly to sell the products of global corporations, serve public interests.
To recover our democracy, relieve human suffering, and protect our planet, we need to do a great many things that may seem unlikely or impossible. But they seem so only if we define ourselves as isolated consumers rather than citizens, if we surrender our will and imagination to the masters of money. Over the next few generations, we will either create a civilization that treats all of its members compassionately and treats Earth respectfully, or we will sink into barbarism. Whatever the odds, I say we should work toward that just and ecologically wise civilization, with all our powers.
by Scott Russel Sander
copied from www.orionmagazine.org
Read the copy underneath for yourself.
Breaking the Spell of Money
ANYONE WHO PAYS ATTENTION to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future.
So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. I would like to focus on a different one—our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth.
To grasp the impact of that confusion, think of someone you love. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements—oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on—you would end up with a few dollars’ worth of raw materials. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight.
Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone’s arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. We’d be likely to say that it’s not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound.
And yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world—as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction. Nothing in nature has been spared—not forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, nor any of the creatures that dwell therein. Nor have human beings been spared. Through its routine practices, this economy subjects people to shoddy products, unsafe working conditions, medical scams, poisoned air and water, propaganda dressed up as journalism, and countless other assaults, all in pursuit of profits.
When tobacco or pharmaceutical companies suppress research that shows their products are killing people, they may not single out particular human beings for execution, yet they deliberately sentence a large number of strangers to premature death. Likewise, when banks launder drug money, when the insurance industry opposes public health care, when the auto industry lobbies against higher fuel-efficiency standards, when arms manufacturers fight any restraint on the trade in guns, when agribusiness opposes limits on the spraying of poisons, when electric utilities evade regulations that would clean up smoke from power plants, when chambers of commerce lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they are just as surely condemning vast numbers of people to illness, injury, and death.
THE ECONOMIST MILTON FRIEDMAN stated flatly that “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” The second half of Friedman’s sentence would place a curb on the first half only in a universe where enterprises motivated entirely by greed never engaged in deception or fraud. This may have seemed like a possibility in the rarefied atmosphere of the Chicago School of Economics, where Friedman held sway and helped to shape the free-market ideology that has dominated American society in recent decades. But in the world where the rest of us live, deception and fraud have been commonplace among corporate giants, from Enron to Exxon, from United Fruit to Union Carbide. Consider a short list of recent malefactors: Halliburton, Philip Morris, WorldCom, Wachovia, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, Blackwater, Monsanto, Massey Energy, Tyco, HealthSouth, Wal-Mart, Global Crossing, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide Financial, AIG, and BP. These companies, and legions of others, have cooked the account books, misrepresented their financial condition with end-of-quarter window dressing, abused their employees, cheated their investors, sold lethal products, violated safety regulations, lied, bribed, swindled, or otherwise refused to stay within “the rules of the game.”
In our country, when the rules become a nuisance or do not sufficiently favor their interests, big companies purchase enough support in the White House or Congress or regulatory agencies to have the rules revised or abolished. Examples of this abuse could be cited from all industries, but none are more egregious than those in finance. Until the mid-1980s, the U.S. financial sector never accounted for more than 16 percent of all corporate profits, but over the past decade it has averaged more than 41 percent, and it has done so while contributing only modestly to social needs, chiefly through local banks and credit unions, and while doing a great deal of harm, chiefly through the creation and trade of financial paper. Most of the economic advisors for President Obama, as for President Bush, have come straight from Wall Street, and, not surprisingly, they have shaped government policy to benefit the biggest Wall Street firms and the richest investors. The global economic meltdown was largely a result of such rigging of the system, which freed commercial and investment banks, trading companies, and rating agencies to gamble recklessly with other people’s money.
In spite of the worldwide suffering caused by this casino capitalism, the financial reform bill passed by Congress in the summer of 2010 does little to rein it in. The managers of hedge funds, for example, have kept their operations essentially free of oversight, while preserving the loophole that treats their earnings as capital gains, taxed at 15 percent, rather than as regular income, which would be taxed in the top bracket at 35 percent. In 2009, when the CEOs of the twenty-five largest American hedge funds split over $26 billion, this cozy arrangement cost the Treasury, and therefore the rest of us, several billion dollars in lost tax revenue. When President Obama urged Congress to close this tax loophole, the billionaire chairman of one hedge fund responded by comparing such a move with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Now, why would a billionaire want more money, and why have some billionaires sought to increase their fortunes by purchasing television networks and newspapers, funding think tanks, hiring armies of lobbyists and propagandists, and setting up phony front groups, all to spread the gospel of no-holds-barred capitalism? You might say that such behavior is natural, because everybody wants more money. But consider: Suppose you keep a billion dollars under your mattress, where it will earn no income, and you set out to spend it; in order to burn through it all within an adult lifetime of, say, fifty years, you would have to spend $1.7 million per month, or $55,000 per day. If you took your billion dollars out from under the mattress and invested it in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at current rates, you could spend $40 million per year, or $110,000 per day, forever, without touching your capital. It so happens that $110,000 is a bit more than twice the median household income in the United States. If you do the math, you will find that the twenty-five hedge fund managers who pulled in $26 billion last year claimed an income equivalent to roughly 500,000 households, or some 2 million people.
What are Rupert Murdoch, David and Charles Koch, Adolph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and other billionaire advocates of unbridled capitalism after? They certainly are not worrying about sending their kids to college or paying their medical bills. Then what are they seeking? A psychiatrist might be better qualified to answer the question, but let me offer an amateur’s hunch, which arises from six decades of watching our legislatures, regulatory agencies, judiciary, public lands, mass media, and schools come under the influence, and often under the total control, of the richest Americans. What the free-enterprise billionaires are greedy for is not money but power, and not merely the power to take care of themselves and their families, which would be reasonable, but the power to have anything they want and do anything they want without limit, which is decidedly unreasonable. Anyone who has shared a house with a two-year-old or a fifteen-year-old has witnessed such a craving to fulfill every desire and throw off every constraint. Most children grow beyond this hankering for omnipotence. Those who carry the craving into adulthood may become sociopaths—incapable of sensing or caring for the needs of other people, indifferent to the harm they cause, reacting aggressively toward anyone or anything that blocks their will.
I’m not saying that all billionaires, or megamillionaires, are sociopaths. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett clearly aren’t, for example, for they are using their fortunes to serve the public good, including funding programs for those who dwell at the other end of the money spectrum. In June of 2010, Gates and Buffett invited the richest individuals and families in America to sign a pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of this writing, fifty-seven have accepted the invitation, including Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York; Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook; Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft; and Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Perhaps they have signed the pledge out of pure altruism. But I would like to believe they also understand that they themselves did not create their financial wealth, however skillful and hardworking they may be; they amassed their money by drawing on the efforts of countless people, living and dead; by drawing on public resources, such as schools and courts; by reaping the benefits of madcap bidding on the stock market; and by drawing on the natural resources of the planet. I would like to believe that, having derived their riches from the commons, they feel obliged to return a substantial portion of those riches for the benefit of the commons.
Whatever their motives, the signers of the Giving Pledge are following the example of Andrew Carnegie. Although he acquired his fortune by methods as ruthless as any employed by buccaneer capitalists today, having made his money, Carnegie gave it all away, except for a modest amount left to his family. We associate his name especially with the more than twenty-five hundred libraries he endowed, but he also funded many other public goods, including a university, a museum, and a foundation for promoting not free enterprise, but education and world peace. In an essay published in 1889 called “The Gospel of Wealth,” he argued that the concentration of great fortunes in the hands of a few was an inevitable result of capitalism, but also a dangerous one, because the resulting disparity between the haves and have-nots would cause social unrest. And so, he insisted, these great fortunes should be restored to society, either through philanthropy or through taxation.
In view of the current efforts, backed by many of the richest Americans, to abolish the estate tax, it is striking to read Carnegie’s view of the matter:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion.… Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.
That is not a passage you are likely to find cited by the Cato Institute, Free Enterprise Fund, Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth, or any of the other strident opponents of the federal estate tax, a tax that under current regulations affects only the richest 1 percent of Americans—the very citizens, by coincidence, who fund the Cato Institute, etc., etc.
Now let us return to pondering the richest of our fellow citizens who show no inclination to share their wealth, but rather seem intent on growing richer by hook or crook, regardless of the consequences for our democracy, the environment, or future generations. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, these individuals use their wealth only to increase their power, and use their power only to guard and increase their wealth, and so on, in an upward spiral toward infinity. Their success in this endeavor can be measured by the fact that the top 1 percent of earners now receives 24 percent of all income in the United States, the highest proportion since the eve of the Great Depression in 1929.
Giant corporations operate in a similar way, using their wealth to increase their power over markets and governments, and using their power to increase their wealth. When I say giant, I am not referring to retailers, banks, factories, or other firms that operate on a modest scale and in one or a few locations. I am referring to the behemoths of business. Of the one hundred largest economies in the world, more than half are multinational corporations. Exxon alone surpasses in revenues the economies of 180 nations. These gigantic empires, spanning the globe, answer to no electorate, move jobs and money about at will, keep much of their operations secret, and oppose any regulation that might cut into their profits. Thus, over the past several decades, Exxon has used its enormous might to oppose higher fuel-efficiency standards, to resist safety regulations that might have prevented the catastrophic oil spill in Prince William Sound, to push for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to thwart legislation aimed at controlling carbon emissions. In doing so, the managers of Exxon have simply obeyed the logic of capitalism, which is to maximize profIts regardless of social and environmental costs. Through trade organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute and numerous front groups, Exxon, Shell, BP, and other energy titans have spent millions of dollars trying to persuade the public that the climate isn’t shifting dangerously, or if it is shifting then humans play no part in the change, or if humans do play a part then nothing can be done about it without stifling the economy.
“Saving the economy” is the slogan used to defend every sort of injustice and negligence, from defeating health-care legislation to ignoring the Clean Water Act to shunning the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But should we save an economy in which the finance industry claims over 40 percent of all corporate profits and a single hedge fund manager claims an income equivalent to that of twenty thousand households? Should we save an economy in which the top 1 percent of earners rake in a quarter of all income? Should we embrace an economy in which one in ten households faces foreclosure, 44 million people live in poverty, and 51 million lack health insurance, an economy in which the unemployment rate for African Americans is above 17 percent and for all workers is nearly 10 percent? Should we defend an economy that even in a recession generates a GDP over $14 trillion, a quarter of the world’s total, and yet is supposedly unable to afford to reduce its carbon emissions? Should we serve an economy that represents less than 5 percent of Earth’s population and yet accounts for nearly half of world military spending? A reasonable person might conclude that such an economy is fatally flawed, and that the flaws will not be repaired by those who profit from them the most.
THE ACCUMULATION OF MONEY gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us. Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for things that do possess intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, nonprofits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn’t directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the very top. While the superrich often pretend to oppose government as an imposition on their freedom, they are usually great fans of government contracts, crop subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and other forms of corporate welfare, and even greater fans of military spending.
Among those who have grasped the link between U.S. militarism and the cult of money was Martin Luther King Jr. In a speech entitled “A Time to Break Silence,” delivered a year to the day before he was assassinated, King went against the counsel of his friends and advisors by denouncing the Vietnam War. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed like every U.S. military operation from the 1950s onward, the war in Vietnam was justified as an effort to promote freedom and democracy and to protect American security. What our military was actually protecting, King argued, were “the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” For saying so, he was denounced as a communist or socialist by newspapers and self-proclaimed patriots nationwide, just as President Obama has been denounced as a socialist for proposing national health care.
The slur is an old one, going back to the late nineteenth century when movements to organize unions or end child labor in factories or secure votes for women were decried as socialist by the robber barons and their henchmen in politics and journalism. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the labels communist and socialist have been used interchangeably by the superrich to condemn any cooperative efforts by citizens to secure basic rights or to serve common needs. These twin labels have been used to vilify the income tax, the estate tax, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, every major piece of environmental legislation, American participation in the UN, disarmament treaties, aid to the poor, humanitarian aid to other nations—any endeavor by government, in short, that might reduce the coffers or curb the power of those who sit atop the greatest heaps of capital.
That power is steadily increasing, as witness the Supreme Court’s decision in early 2010, by a 5-4 vote, in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, which holds that corporate funding of political broadcasts during elections cannot be limited. The majority based their argument on the twin claims, never mentioned in the Constitution, that corporations are entitled to be treated as persons under the law and that money is a form of speech, and therefore any constraint on spending by corporations to influence elections would be a denial of their right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. The decision means that our electoral process, already corrupted by big money, will fall even more under the sway of corporations and their innocuous-sounding front groups, such as “Citizens United.” The nearly unanimous view among the nation’s leading First Amendment scholars, voiced at a meeting in March of 2010, was that the case was wrongly decided. But the only five opinions that count are those of the judges in the majority, who were appointed to the Supreme Court by administrations that have benefited most handsomely from corporate financing.
MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator or monarch; that they are using this power to skew the game more and more in their favor; and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.
It is just as important that we shake off the spell of consumerism. In 1955, a retailing analyst named Victor Lebow bluntly described what an ever-expanding capitalism would require of us: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. The economy needs things consumed, burned, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” And so it has come to pass. Americans, by and large, have made consumption a way of life, and a prime source, if not of spiritual satisfaction, then of compensation for whatever else might be missing from our lives, such as meaningful work, intact families, high-quality schools, honest government, safe streets, a healthy environment, a nation at peace, leisure time, neighborliness, community engagement, and other fast-disappearing or entirely vanished boons.
Advertisers maintain the consumerist illusion by appealing to our every impulse, from lust and envy to love of family and nature. The estimates for annual spending on advertising in the U.S. hover around $500 billion. This is roughly the amount we spend annually on public education. While taxpayers complain about the cost of schools, they do not protest the cost of advertising, which inflates the price of everything we purchase, and which aims at persuading us to view the buying of stuff as the pathway to happiness. A current ad for Coke, showing a frosty bottle, actually uses the slogan “Open Happiness.” The promise is false, and all of us know it, yet we keep falling for the illusion. We can begin to free ourselves from that illusion by reducing our exposure to those media, such as commercial television and radio, that are primarily devoted to merchandising. We can laugh at advertising. We can distinguish between our needs, which are finite, and our wants, which are limitless. Beyond meeting our basic needs, money cannot give us any of the things that actually bring happiness—family, community, good health, good work, experience of art and nature, service to others, a sense of purpose, spiritual insight.
When we do spend money, so far as possible we should put it in the hands of our neighbors—local merchants, professionals, growers, craft workers, artists, chefs, and makers of useful things—and we should put as little as possible in the coffers of distant corporations and plutocrats, who know and care nothing about our communities. We should encourage efforts to restore local economies through small-scale manufacturing, sustainable agriculture and forestry, distributed energy generation, credit unions, public-access television and radio, nonprofits, and cooperatives. We should experiment with local currencies, as a number of cities across the U.S. have done. When possible, we should barter goods and services, avoiding the use of money altogether.
As a nation, we need to quit using the flow of money as the chief measure of our well-being. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is the dollar value of our nation’s economic output in a given period, without regard to the purpose of that output. So the cost of cleaning up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico adds to the GDP, as does an epidemic of cancer, a recall of salmonella-laced eggs, a bombing campaign in Afghanistan, lawsuits against Ponzi schemers, prison construction, and every other sort of ill. The GDP does not reflect work done at home without pay, volunteer work in the community, or mutual aid exchanged between neighbors. It counts junk food you buy on the highway but not food you grow in your backyard. It counts the child care you purchase but not the care you provide. If you lead a healthy life, you contribute little to the GDP through medical expenditures, but if you smoke, become addicted to drugs or alcohol, become dangerously obese, neglect your health in any way at all, you’re sure to boost the GDP. War also swells the GDP, but peacemaking does not. We need to devise measures of well-being that take into account the actual quality of life in our society, from the rate of incarceration (currently the highest in the world) to the rate of infant mortality (currently thirty-third in the world), from the condition of our soils and rivers and air to the safety of our streets.
One need not be an economist—as I am not—to see that our economic system is profoundly unjust in its distribution of benefits and damage, that it relies on violence toward people and planet, and that it is eroding the foundations of democracy. What should we do? Not as any sort of expert, but as a citizen, I say we need to get big money out of politics by publicly financing elections and strictly regulating lobbyists. We need to preserve the estate tax, for its abolition would lead to rule by an aristocracy of inherited wealth, just the sort of tyranny we threw off in our revolt against Britain. We need to defend the natural and cultural goods we share, such as the oceans and the internet, from those who seek to exploit the common wealth for their sole profit. We need to stop private-sector companies from dictating research agendas in our public universities. We need legislation that strips corporations of the legal status of persons. We need to restore the original definition of a corporation as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures. We need to enforce the anti-trust laws, breaking up giant corporations into units small enough to be answerable to democratic control. We need to require that the public airwaves, now used mainly to sell the products of global corporations, serve public interests.
To recover our democracy, relieve human suffering, and protect our planet, we need to do a great many things that may seem unlikely or impossible. But they seem so only if we define ourselves as isolated consumers rather than citizens, if we surrender our will and imagination to the masters of money. Over the next few generations, we will either create a civilization that treats all of its members compassionately and treats Earth respectfully, or we will sink into barbarism. Whatever the odds, I say we should work toward that just and ecologically wise civilization, with all our powers.
by Scott Russel Sander
copied from www.orionmagazine.org
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Alan Huyshe 1956 = 2011
.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the
scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
"Invictus" by William Ernest Henley
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the
scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
"Invictus" by William Ernest Henley
Friday, July 22, 2011
The New Macho
While it is certainly a difficult task to try and reclaim the word 'macho' as anything other than the stereotypical violent and out of touch guy portrayed in much of the media, the articles make some good points. One thing that we notice in reading them is that many of the men we know, respect and love in the ManKind Project represent the idea of the "The New Macho" very well. We call these men New Warriors. So bravo, men, keep on evolving!
We are teaching Emotional Integrity and Radical Personal Responsibility. We are helping each other become more resilient, more awake and more inspired to follow our purpose and live our mission. Here are some characteristics that a member of the ManKind Project has put forward as part of the'New Macho' paradigm.
The New Macho
He cleans up after himself.
He cleans up the planet.
He is a role model for young men.
He is rigorously honest and fiercely optimistic.
He holds himself accountable.
He knows what he feels.
He knows how to cry and he lets it go.
He knows how to rage without hurting others.
He knows how to fear and how to keep moving.
He seeks self-mastery.
He's let go of childish shame.
He feels guilty when he's done something wrong.
He is kind to men, kind to women, kind to children.
He teaches others how to be kind.
He says he's sorry.
He stopped blaming women or his parents or men for his pain years ago.
He stopped letting his defenses ruin his relationships.
He stopped letting his penis run his life.
He has enough self respect to tell the truth.
He creates intimacy and trust with his actions.
He has men that he trusts and that he turns to for support.
He knows how to roll with it.
He knows how to make it happen.
He is disciplined when he needs to be.
He is flexible when he needs to be.
He knows how to listen from the core of his being.
He's not afraid to get dirty.
He's ready to confront his own limitations.
He has high expectations for himself and for those he connects with.
He looks for ways to serve others.
He knows he is an individual.
He knows that we are all one.
He knows he is an animal and a part of nature.
He knows his spirit and his connection to something greater.
He knows that the future generations are watching his actions.
He builds communities where people are respected and valued.
He takes responsibility for himself and is also willing to be his brother's keeper.
He knows his higher purpose.
He loves with fierceness.
He laughs with abandon, because he gets the joke.
This is the Mature Masculine - it is the redefinition of masculinity for the 21st century. By no means is this list complete. You are welcome to come and add your gifts to this community. - Boysen Hodgson
read more: http://mankindproject.org/#ixzz1SqTNkkhy
We are teaching Emotional Integrity and Radical Personal Responsibility. We are helping each other become more resilient, more awake and more inspired to follow our purpose and live our mission. Here are some characteristics that a member of the ManKind Project has put forward as part of the'New Macho' paradigm.
The New Macho
He cleans up after himself.
He cleans up the planet.
He is a role model for young men.
He is rigorously honest and fiercely optimistic.
He holds himself accountable.
He knows what he feels.
He knows how to cry and he lets it go.
He knows how to rage without hurting others.
He knows how to fear and how to keep moving.
He seeks self-mastery.
He's let go of childish shame.
He feels guilty when he's done something wrong.
He is kind to men, kind to women, kind to children.
He teaches others how to be kind.
He says he's sorry.
He stopped blaming women or his parents or men for his pain years ago.
He stopped letting his defenses ruin his relationships.
He stopped letting his penis run his life.
He has enough self respect to tell the truth.
He creates intimacy and trust with his actions.
He has men that he trusts and that he turns to for support.
He knows how to roll with it.
He knows how to make it happen.
He is disciplined when he needs to be.
He is flexible when he needs to be.
He knows how to listen from the core of his being.
He's not afraid to get dirty.
He's ready to confront his own limitations.
He has high expectations for himself and for those he connects with.
He looks for ways to serve others.
He knows he is an individual.
He knows that we are all one.
He knows he is an animal and a part of nature.
He knows his spirit and his connection to something greater.
He knows that the future generations are watching his actions.
He builds communities where people are respected and valued.
He takes responsibility for himself and is also willing to be his brother's keeper.
He knows his higher purpose.
He loves with fierceness.
He laughs with abandon, because he gets the joke.
This is the Mature Masculine - it is the redefinition of masculinity for the 21st century. By no means is this list complete. You are welcome to come and add your gifts to this community. - Boysen Hodgson
read more: http://mankindproject.org/#ixzz1SqTNkkhy
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Prejudices
An Introduction to Power, Privilege and Difference.
You are invited to take part in an evening of exploration into our conscious and unconscious attitudes, beliefs and actions and the impact that they may have, whether intended or not.
COMPLETE THE SENTENCE:
Wearing that kind of dress she was….
He’s as tight as a…
The trouble with gays is that they…
Black people tend to be…
They drink too much, those…
Children should be…
That Arab with a beard looks like a…
Women drivers are…
Were you surprised or even shocked at how easily the words came..?
Do you struggle in your relationships?
Do you find yourself thinking or muttering things that you would be embarrassed to say out loud ?
Do you want to liberate yourself from prejudice?
You are invited to take part in an evening of exploration into our conscious and unconscious attitudes, beliefs and actions and the impact that they may have, whether intended or not.
COMPLETE THE SENTENCE:
Wearing that kind of dress she was….
He’s as tight as a…
The trouble with gays is that they…
Black people tend to be…
They drink too much, those…
Children should be…
That Arab with a beard looks like a…
Women drivers are…
Were you surprised or even shocked at how easily the words came..?
Do you struggle in your relationships?
Do you find yourself thinking or muttering things that you would be embarrassed to say out loud ?
Do you want to liberate yourself from prejudice?
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Nelson Mandela
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his
head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."
Nelson Mandela
head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."
Nelson Mandela
Sunday, July 10, 2011
The MKP Adventure
The ManKindProject
Empowering men to live their true potential
The Adventure (The New Warrior Training Adventure) is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to challenge your limitations, your wounding, and your impaired vision of your life as a man. It is a space to discover what it is that holds you back from being the man that you could feel truly proud of. It is an intense and carefully choreographed event designed to help you see how you hurt yourself and those you love, to face the pain you may experience for yourself or impose on others, and to learn the art of transforming it into personal responsibility – for this is the gateway to liberation from the past.
The great disappointment of modern masculinity is that there are so few mature, wise men to show us the way. Most men can admit they did not get enough fathering; many feel that they grew from boy to man without much guidance. The ManKind Project cannot replace these missing elders but it can empower men to father themselves and, in time, become themselves the elders and fathers of the future. Together, we can positively change the future for other boys and young men. Together, we can positively change the way girls and women are impacted by boys and men. Together, we can play our part in creating a future that we can feel proud of.
The Adventure is a modern male initiation and self-examination. We believe that this is crucial to the development of a healthy and mature male self, no matter how old a man is. It is the “hero’s journey” of classical literature and myth that has nearly disappeared in modern culture. We ask men to stop living vicariously through movies, television, addictions and distractions and step up into their own adventure – in real time and surrounded by other men.
“The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts. That is where the battle must be fought.” — Mahatma Ghandi
from the MKP-UK homepage.
Empowering men to live their true potential
The Adventure (The New Warrior Training Adventure) is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to challenge your limitations, your wounding, and your impaired vision of your life as a man. It is a space to discover what it is that holds you back from being the man that you could feel truly proud of. It is an intense and carefully choreographed event designed to help you see how you hurt yourself and those you love, to face the pain you may experience for yourself or impose on others, and to learn the art of transforming it into personal responsibility – for this is the gateway to liberation from the past.
The great disappointment of modern masculinity is that there are so few mature, wise men to show us the way. Most men can admit they did not get enough fathering; many feel that they grew from boy to man without much guidance. The ManKind Project cannot replace these missing elders but it can empower men to father themselves and, in time, become themselves the elders and fathers of the future. Together, we can positively change the future for other boys and young men. Together, we can positively change the way girls and women are impacted by boys and men. Together, we can play our part in creating a future that we can feel proud of.
The Adventure is a modern male initiation and self-examination. We believe that this is crucial to the development of a healthy and mature male self, no matter how old a man is. It is the “hero’s journey” of classical literature and myth that has nearly disappeared in modern culture. We ask men to stop living vicariously through movies, television, addictions and distractions and step up into their own adventure – in real time and surrounded by other men.
“The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts. That is where the battle must be fought.” — Mahatma Ghandi
from the MKP-UK homepage.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Confronting whiteness
How should I live in this strange place? This deceptively poetic question
captures an existential journey on which a white South African philosopher
and colleague of mine, Samantha Vice, has recently embarked.
She thinks white South Africans should feel shame and regret for the past
and for the fact that their whiteness still benefits them unjustly. She is
grappling with what it means for her to be a white person in a country that
is still deeply racialised, deeply political and deeply unjust. Her
reflections drip with an intense honesty that is too rare in the South
African academy. Sadly, it is an honesty often culpably missing from the
lives of too many white South Africans.
You might never have heard of Vice, in part because she does not think that
whites should participate in the public political processes of this country.
She is therefore tentative about placing her work in the public space, but
has started a conversation within the academy, a space in which she feels
she has the skills to make a contribution and is less burdened by her
whiteness than she might be within the public political arena.
In a dramatic way, her reluctance to step into the public space is an active
silence that is part of her argument. But I also think our country has long
needed brilliant and honest academics, such as Vice, to place their ideas
within the public space where they could have the greatest reach. No topic
deserves such treatment more urgently than the permanent elephant in any
South African room -- race. So, allow me to rehearse Vice's reflections and
to engage them.
Vice argues that the moral selves of whites are deeply stained by the unjust
system from which they have benefited. Whiteness, for her, is implicated in
the injustices that the black majority continue to experience 17 years
later. Whites should feel shame and regret, and make amends for being unjust
beneficiaries of whiteness. They should also withdraw from the political
space and live "in humility and silence", embarking on personal journeys,
inwardly focused, aimed at repairing their damaged moral selves.
By "whiteness" Vice is referring to the fact that a white skin has resulted
in benefits for the person who is white. This just is a historical fact. The
entire system of anti-black racism and apartheid benefited those who were
white. Whiteness became the norm of society.
Being white in all sectors of society was as advantageous as being male or
being masculine in the corporate sector. It was the "norm" and anything that
deviated from the norm was non-white, a negative description capturing the
judgment that non-whites are defective. Being non-white is as defective as
being gay or bisexual in a world in which heterosexuality is the norm.
Vice acknowledges that many whites resent the fact that they did not choose
to be white or to benefit from being white. Indeed, some whites opposed
apartheid. But shame and regret are not moral emotions that you should feel
only when you did something wrong yourself.
You should also be ashamed of benefiting unjustly. Feeling shame as a white
person is a way of acknowledging that you have been living in a world filled
with an injustice rooted in your whiteness. Shame is an acknowledgement that
the world you live in is not as it should be -- just and nonracial. Regret,
too, is appropriate. Vice regrets her own whiteness, not because she chose
it (which she could not have) but because her whiteness is what keeps the
unjust system, in which blacks are still socially and economically worse off
than whites, going.
Whiteness is not a historical fact only living on in history textbooks. It
continues to benefit whites. Indeed, one of the most profound observations
Vice makes is precisely the fact that South African whites are so
unconsciously habituated into an uncritical white way of being that they
fail even to acknowledge how being white continues to represent massive
social capital.
Just as a sexist black man or a homophobic white woman might never
acknowledge how they benefit from patriarchy and hetero-normativity (after
all, we live in a liberal society now, don't we, in which men and women and
gay and straight people are equal), so many whites take little care to
acknowledge the benefits of whiteness. Some will have the audacity to
respond to this article by claiming, in fact, to be victims, to be the new
blacks of South Africa.
They will argue that "the system" has now changed, because St John's College
in Houghton has now had a black head prefect, and most new BMWs are bought
by black professionals, and victims of anti-white racism now exist. Yet the
brutal, cold facts about poverty, inequality and unemployment, when analysed
along racial lines, underscore Vice's more honest view that whiteness
continues to represent unjust benefiting in post-democratic South Africa.
Whiteness remains the norm. Whiteness remains hip. And that is why it is
praiseworthy that Vice feels shame and regret for her whiteness.
Vice's reflections should resonate with whites in general. But they will
not. Shame and regret are difficult emotions to own up to. It is easier to
focus attention on others, like pointing out how corrupt this "black
government" is or how difficult it was for Johan, the neighbour's son, to
get a job despite having an engineering degree. Confronting your own self,
and being ashamed of benefiting unjustly from your whiteness, is too painful
for many to manage.
Vice's only mistake is her decision to withdraw from the public political
sphere. It is not black South Africans' turn to be political. It is all
South Africans' duty to engage each other as equals both within the public
and private spheres. Whites need to engage their whiteness publicly.
I do not want to be shielded from whiteness. I want to be given the space to
rehearse my own full personhood as a black South African by engaging Vice
publicly; it is the only way healthy relationships between blacks and whites
can develop.
Vice should, instead, have given slightly different advice to whites. This
is what I say to whites: "You have an unqualified political and ethical
right to engage in the political and public spheres of (y)our country, but
be mindful of how your whiteness still benefits you and gives you unearned
privileges. Engage black South Africans with humility, and be mindful of not
reinforcing whiteness as normative, just as a loud, boisterous,
rugby-obsessive chief executive should take care of his unearned privileges
as an aggressive, masculine male in the boardroom."
The journey will be worth it. But it requires discomforting honesty. We owe
it to ourselves as a nation in the making.
Eusebius McKaiser is a political commentator and an associate at the Wits
Centre for Ethics
captures an existential journey on which a white South African philosopher
and colleague of mine, Samantha Vice, has recently embarked.
She thinks white South Africans should feel shame and regret for the past
and for the fact that their whiteness still benefits them unjustly. She is
grappling with what it means for her to be a white person in a country that
is still deeply racialised, deeply political and deeply unjust. Her
reflections drip with an intense honesty that is too rare in the South
African academy. Sadly, it is an honesty often culpably missing from the
lives of too many white South Africans.
You might never have heard of Vice, in part because she does not think that
whites should participate in the public political processes of this country.
She is therefore tentative about placing her work in the public space, but
has started a conversation within the academy, a space in which she feels
she has the skills to make a contribution and is less burdened by her
whiteness than she might be within the public political arena.
In a dramatic way, her reluctance to step into the public space is an active
silence that is part of her argument. But I also think our country has long
needed brilliant and honest academics, such as Vice, to place their ideas
within the public space where they could have the greatest reach. No topic
deserves such treatment more urgently than the permanent elephant in any
South African room -- race. So, allow me to rehearse Vice's reflections and
to engage them.
Vice argues that the moral selves of whites are deeply stained by the unjust
system from which they have benefited. Whiteness, for her, is implicated in
the injustices that the black majority continue to experience 17 years
later. Whites should feel shame and regret, and make amends for being unjust
beneficiaries of whiteness. They should also withdraw from the political
space and live "in humility and silence", embarking on personal journeys,
inwardly focused, aimed at repairing their damaged moral selves.
By "whiteness" Vice is referring to the fact that a white skin has resulted
in benefits for the person who is white. This just is a historical fact. The
entire system of anti-black racism and apartheid benefited those who were
white. Whiteness became the norm of society.
Being white in all sectors of society was as advantageous as being male or
being masculine in the corporate sector. It was the "norm" and anything that
deviated from the norm was non-white, a negative description capturing the
judgment that non-whites are defective. Being non-white is as defective as
being gay or bisexual in a world in which heterosexuality is the norm.
Vice acknowledges that many whites resent the fact that they did not choose
to be white or to benefit from being white. Indeed, some whites opposed
apartheid. But shame and regret are not moral emotions that you should feel
only when you did something wrong yourself.
You should also be ashamed of benefiting unjustly. Feeling shame as a white
person is a way of acknowledging that you have been living in a world filled
with an injustice rooted in your whiteness. Shame is an acknowledgement that
the world you live in is not as it should be -- just and nonracial. Regret,
too, is appropriate. Vice regrets her own whiteness, not because she chose
it (which she could not have) but because her whiteness is what keeps the
unjust system, in which blacks are still socially and economically worse off
than whites, going.
Whiteness is not a historical fact only living on in history textbooks. It
continues to benefit whites. Indeed, one of the most profound observations
Vice makes is precisely the fact that South African whites are so
unconsciously habituated into an uncritical white way of being that they
fail even to acknowledge how being white continues to represent massive
social capital.
Just as a sexist black man or a homophobic white woman might never
acknowledge how they benefit from patriarchy and hetero-normativity (after
all, we live in a liberal society now, don't we, in which men and women and
gay and straight people are equal), so many whites take little care to
acknowledge the benefits of whiteness. Some will have the audacity to
respond to this article by claiming, in fact, to be victims, to be the new
blacks of South Africa.
They will argue that "the system" has now changed, because St John's College
in Houghton has now had a black head prefect, and most new BMWs are bought
by black professionals, and victims of anti-white racism now exist. Yet the
brutal, cold facts about poverty, inequality and unemployment, when analysed
along racial lines, underscore Vice's more honest view that whiteness
continues to represent unjust benefiting in post-democratic South Africa.
Whiteness remains the norm. Whiteness remains hip. And that is why it is
praiseworthy that Vice feels shame and regret for her whiteness.
Vice's reflections should resonate with whites in general. But they will
not. Shame and regret are difficult emotions to own up to. It is easier to
focus attention on others, like pointing out how corrupt this "black
government" is or how difficult it was for Johan, the neighbour's son, to
get a job despite having an engineering degree. Confronting your own self,
and being ashamed of benefiting unjustly from your whiteness, is too painful
for many to manage.
Vice's only mistake is her decision to withdraw from the public political
sphere. It is not black South Africans' turn to be political. It is all
South Africans' duty to engage each other as equals both within the public
and private spheres. Whites need to engage their whiteness publicly.
I do not want to be shielded from whiteness. I want to be given the space to
rehearse my own full personhood as a black South African by engaging Vice
publicly; it is the only way healthy relationships between blacks and whites
can develop.
Vice should, instead, have given slightly different advice to whites. This
is what I say to whites: "You have an unqualified political and ethical
right to engage in the political and public spheres of (y)our country, but
be mindful of how your whiteness still benefits you and gives you unearned
privileges. Engage black South Africans with humility, and be mindful of not
reinforcing whiteness as normative, just as a loud, boisterous,
rugby-obsessive chief executive should take care of his unearned privileges
as an aggressive, masculine male in the boardroom."
The journey will be worth it. But it requires discomforting honesty. We owe
it to ourselves as a nation in the making.
Eusebius McKaiser is a political commentator and an associate at the Wits
Centre for Ethics
Monday, June 27, 2011
Robert Moore
Structures of the Self
Depth psychology infers the existence of archetypes in the collective unconscious in part by the startling correspondences between the guiding images of very different cultures. These images surface in myths, in philosophical and theological speculations, in artistic productions, in scientific achievements, and in institutional and societal designs. Though some disciplines emphasize the differences between cultures, as a depth psychologist, Dr. Moore, like sociobiologists and other researchers, is most concerned with similarities. Dr. Moore's research has found an archetype that is eternal, a constant construct within the masculine psyche, which is revealed in the fourfold pattern of King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover energies.
King
The mythic images of the King and Queen, in males and females, represent an instinctual line having to do with nurturing and centering in the human personality. This Royal line of development has to do with inclusive nurturing and blessing. It is critical for the self. Without it, you are not calm, you are not centered, you do not have a vision, you do not have a sense of "I am" and "I want." A lot of men want to know what they want but cannot find it. That is because of a lack of development of this Royal line.
It is easy enough to discover whether this energy is developed within yourself. Just ask yourself one question. When did I last really bless and affirm another person? Was it today, yesterday, last week, last month, last year? Do I find that I do this frequently and spontaneously, or is it an effort? If it's something you do infrequently, and with an effort, you are short of King energy. Most of the men on the planet are in the same position as yourself.
Warrior
The mythic images of the Warrior, in males and females, represent both the capacity for aggression and the ability to serve a cause. The energy of the Warrior is that energy of focused discipline, boundaries, service and mission. It is the ability to get organized and motivated, and the ability to follow the vision found in the royal line of development. Without the Warrior, there is no motivation, no energy to be accessed for a goal. It defends the boundaries of the "I am" and the "I want." And when immature, undeveloped and uninitiated, this energy causes all kinds of trouble, from passivity to rampant violence, both of which we are facing globally.
There are several vital signs of the shortage of Warrior energy, among them failure to defend boundaries in relationships, especially intimate relationships, lack of focus, and absence of clear goals.
Magician
Mythic images of the Magician, high priest or priestess, represent the cognitive line of development. This has to do with moving from mere knowledge to wisdom which is used for healing of self and community.
The Magician and the Royal line are in tension. This is the same for men and for women. There is no difference there. In other words, it is just as hard for men and women; just as hard to develop generativity and the capacity to bless and nurture. We are alike in that way.
If you are strong in the Magician quarter, you will be the sort of person who uses his intuition in the service of others, a man who, for instance, thinks through a problem that faces one of your children, coming up with a solution which is suitable for them, and which doesn't necessarily serve yourself.
Lover
The mythic image of the Lover is an instinctual line of development of sexuality, affiliation, intimacy, embodiment and joy. If you do not have a connection with this, then you do not have any fun. No matter how smart or how caring you are there is not "dance" in your life.
The Lover is the man in touch with his feelings, the man who expresses his joy, his pain, his anger, his fear, spontaneously. He is, most definitely, not someone who bottles up or covers over what he feels.
References
The Quartet of Books: The King Within, The Warrior Within, The Magician Within, The Lover Within.
Moore, R. (1997). Masculine initiation for the 21st century: The global challenge. The New Warrior Handbook.
Depth psychology infers the existence of archetypes in the collective unconscious in part by the startling correspondences between the guiding images of very different cultures. These images surface in myths, in philosophical and theological speculations, in artistic productions, in scientific achievements, and in institutional and societal designs. Though some disciplines emphasize the differences between cultures, as a depth psychologist, Dr. Moore, like sociobiologists and other researchers, is most concerned with similarities. Dr. Moore's research has found an archetype that is eternal, a constant construct within the masculine psyche, which is revealed in the fourfold pattern of King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover energies.
King
The mythic images of the King and Queen, in males and females, represent an instinctual line having to do with nurturing and centering in the human personality. This Royal line of development has to do with inclusive nurturing and blessing. It is critical for the self. Without it, you are not calm, you are not centered, you do not have a vision, you do not have a sense of "I am" and "I want." A lot of men want to know what they want but cannot find it. That is because of a lack of development of this Royal line.
It is easy enough to discover whether this energy is developed within yourself. Just ask yourself one question. When did I last really bless and affirm another person? Was it today, yesterday, last week, last month, last year? Do I find that I do this frequently and spontaneously, or is it an effort? If it's something you do infrequently, and with an effort, you are short of King energy. Most of the men on the planet are in the same position as yourself.
Warrior
The mythic images of the Warrior, in males and females, represent both the capacity for aggression and the ability to serve a cause. The energy of the Warrior is that energy of focused discipline, boundaries, service and mission. It is the ability to get organized and motivated, and the ability to follow the vision found in the royal line of development. Without the Warrior, there is no motivation, no energy to be accessed for a goal. It defends the boundaries of the "I am" and the "I want." And when immature, undeveloped and uninitiated, this energy causes all kinds of trouble, from passivity to rampant violence, both of which we are facing globally.
There are several vital signs of the shortage of Warrior energy, among them failure to defend boundaries in relationships, especially intimate relationships, lack of focus, and absence of clear goals.
Magician
Mythic images of the Magician, high priest or priestess, represent the cognitive line of development. This has to do with moving from mere knowledge to wisdom which is used for healing of self and community.
The Magician and the Royal line are in tension. This is the same for men and for women. There is no difference there. In other words, it is just as hard for men and women; just as hard to develop generativity and the capacity to bless and nurture. We are alike in that way.
If you are strong in the Magician quarter, you will be the sort of person who uses his intuition in the service of others, a man who, for instance, thinks through a problem that faces one of your children, coming up with a solution which is suitable for them, and which doesn't necessarily serve yourself.
Lover
The mythic image of the Lover is an instinctual line of development of sexuality, affiliation, intimacy, embodiment and joy. If you do not have a connection with this, then you do not have any fun. No matter how smart or how caring you are there is not "dance" in your life.
The Lover is the man in touch with his feelings, the man who expresses his joy, his pain, his anger, his fear, spontaneously. He is, most definitely, not someone who bottles up or covers over what he feels.
References
The Quartet of Books: The King Within, The Warrior Within, The Magician Within, The Lover Within.
Moore, R. (1997). Masculine initiation for the 21st century: The global challenge. The New Warrior Handbook.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Seekers
Gents
I am a long time admirer of the writings of Joseph Campbell and am aware of
MKP's indebtedness to Campbell for the timeless, poetic and mythical
structure of the hero's journey central to the NWTA. I am currently dipping
into a book on screenwriting that draws heavily on Campbell to provide a
road map for writers wanting to construct a hero's journey in film scripts.
The author, Vogler, believes most popular films strike a deep cord with
audiences precisely because they are based around such a hero's journey.
To illustrate the mythical arc of a typical hero's journey, Vogler tells the
story of The Seekers. I am sharing The Seekers here as it seem to me to
powerfully describe the mythical journey undertaken by initiates before,
during and after the NWTA, and affirms the timeless and universal resonances
of the training.
The Seekers
The Ordinary World
Look around, sister, brother of the Home Tribe. You can see the people are
barely getting by, surviving on a dwindling supply of last season's food.
Times are bad and the country all around seems lifeless. The people grow
weak before our eyes, but a few of us are filled with restless energy. Like
you. You're uncomfortable, feeling you no longer fit in with this drab,
exhausted place. You may not know it, but you're soon to be selected as a
hero, to join the select company of the Seekers, those who have always gone
out to face the unknown. You'll undertake a journey to restore life and
health to the entire Home Tribe, an adventure in which the only sure thing
is that you'll be changed. You're uneasy, but there's a thrill running
through you. You're poised to break free from this world, ready to enter the
world of adventure.
The Call To Adventure
Trouble shadows the Home Tribe. You hear its call, in the grumbling of our
stomach and the cries of our hungry children. The land for miles around is
tapped out and barren and clearly someone must go beyond the familiar
territory. That unknown land is strange and fills us with fear, but pressure
mounts to do something, to take some risks, so that life can continue.
A figure emerges from the campfire smoke, an elder of the Home Tribe,
pointing to you. Yes, you have been chosen as a Seeker and called to begin a
new quest. You'll venture your life so that the greater life of the Home
Tribe may go on.
Refusal Of The Call
Gather your gear, fellow Seeker. Think ahead to possible dangers, and
reflect on past disasters. The spectre of the unknown walks among us,
halting our progress at the threshold. Some of us turn down the quest, some
hesitate, some are tugged at by families who fear for our lives and don't
want us to go. You hear people mutter that the journey is foolhardy, doomed
from the start. You feel fear constricting your breathing and making your
heart race. Should you stay with the Home Tribe, and let others risk their
necks in the quest ? Are you cut out to be a Seeker ?
Meeting With The Mentor
You Seekers, fearful at the brink of adventure, consult with the elders of
the Home Tribe. Seek out those who have gone before. Learn the secret lore
of watering holes, games trails, and berry patches, and what badlands,
quicksand, and monsters to avoid. An old one, feeble to go out again,
scratches a map for us in the dirt. The shaman of the tribe presses
something into your hand, a magic gift, a potent talisman that will protect
us and guide us on the quest. Now we can set out with lighter hearts and
greater confidence, for we take with us the collected wisdom of the Home
Tribe.
Crossing The First Threshold
The ranks of the Seekers are thinner now. Some of us have dropped out, but
the final few are ready to cross the threshold and truly begin the
adventure. The problems of the Home Tribe are clear to everyone, and
desperate - something must be done, now ! Ready or not, we lope out of the
village leaving all things familiar behind. As you pull away you feel the
jerk of the invisible threads that bind you to your loved ones. It's
difficult to pull away from everything you know but with a deep breath you
go on, taking the plunge into the abyss of the unknown. We enter a strange
no-man's-land, a world between worlds, a zone of crossing that may be
desolate and lonely. Or, in places, crowded with life. You sense the
presence of other beings, other forces with sharp thorns or claws, guarding
the way to the treasure you seek. But there's no turning back now, we all
feel it; the adventure has begun for good or ill.
Tests, Allies, Enemies
We Seekers are in shock - this new world is so different from the home we've
always known. Not only are the terrain and the local residents different,
the rules of this place are strange as they can be. Different things are
valued here and we have a lot to learn about the local currency, customs,
and language. Strange creatures jump out at you! Think fast! Don't eat that,
it could be poison! Exhausted by the journey across the desolate threshold
zone, we're running out of time and energy. Remember our people back in the
Home Tribe are counting on us. Enough sight-seeing, let's concentrate on the
goal. We must go where the food and game and information are to be found.
There our skills will be tested, and we'll come one step closer to what we
seek.
Approach To The Inmost Cave
Our band of Seekers leaves the oasis at the edge of the new world, refreshed
and armed with more knowledge about the nature and habits of the game we're
hunting. We're ready press on to the heart of the new world where the
greatest treasures are guarded by our greatest fears. Look around at your
fellow Seekers. We've changed already and new qualities are emerging. Who's
the leader now? Some who were not suited for life in the Ordinary World are
now thriving. Others who seemed ideal for adventure are turning out to be
the least able. A new perception of yourself and others is forming. Based on
this new awareness, you can make plans and direct yourself towards getting
what you want from the Special World. Soon you will be ready to enter the
Inmost Cave.
The Ordeal
Seeker, enter the Inmost Cave and look for that which will restore life to
the Home Tribe. The way grows narrow and dark. You must go alone on hands
and knees and you feel the earth press close around you. You can hardly
breathe. Suddenly you come out into the deepest chamber and find yourself
face-to-face with a towering figure, a menacing Shadow composed of all your
doubts and fears and well armed to defend a treasure. Here, in this moment,
is the chance to win all or die. No matter what you came for, it's Death
that now stares back at you. Whatever the outcome of the battle, you are
about to taste death and it will change you.
Reward
We Seekers look at one another with growing smiles. We've won the right to
be called heroes. For the sake of the Home Tribe we faced death, tasted it,
and yet lived. From the depths of terror we suddenly shoot up to victory.
It's time to fill our empty bellies and raise our voices around the campfire
to sing of our deeds. Old wounds and grievances are forgotten. The story of
our journey is already being woven. You pull apart from the rest, strangely
quiet. In the leaping shadows you remember those who didn't make it, and you
notice something. You're different. You've changed. Part of you has died and
something new has been born. You and the world will never seem the same.
This too is part of the Reward for facing death.
The Road Back
Wake up, Seekers! Shake off the effects of our feast and celebration and
remember why we came out here in the first place! People back home are
starving and it's urgent, now that we've recovered from the ordeal, to load
up our backpacks with food and treasure and head for home. Besides, there's
no telling what dangers still lurk on the edge on the hunting grounds. You
pause at the edge of camp to look back. They'll never believe this back
home. How to tell them? Something bright on the ground catches your eyes.
You bend to pick it up - a beautiful smooth stone with an inner glow.
Suddenly a dark shape darts out at you, all fangs. Run! Run for your life!
The Resurrection
We weary Seekers shuffle back towards the village. Look! The smoke of the
Home Tribe fires! Pick up the pace! But wait - the shaman appears to stop us
from charging back in. You have been to the land of the Death, he says, and
you look like death itself, covered in blood, carrying the torn flesh and
hide of your game. If you march back into the village without purifying and
cleansing yourselves, you may bring death back with you. You must undergo
one final sacrifice before rejoining the tribe. Your warriors self must die
so you can be reborn as an innocent into the group. The trick is to keep the
wisdom of the Ordeal, while getting rid of its bad effects. After all we've
been through, fellow Seekers, we must face one more trial, maybe the hardest
one yet.
Return With The Elixir
We Seekers come home at last, purged, purified, and bearing the fruits of
our journey. We share out the nourishment and treasure among the Home Tribe,
with many a good story about how they were won. A circle has been closed,
you can feel it. You can see that our struggles on the Road of Heroes have
brought new life to our land. There will be other adventures, but this one
is complete, and as it ends it brings deep healing, wellness, and wholeness
to our world. The Seekers have come Home.
From: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
By Christopher Vogler
David Wicht
c +27 83 254 3777 h +27 21 795 5698
1 Old Cottage Rd Silverhurst
Constantia 7806 South Africa
I am a long time admirer of the writings of Joseph Campbell and am aware of
MKP's indebtedness to Campbell for the timeless, poetic and mythical
structure of the hero's journey central to the NWTA. I am currently dipping
into a book on screenwriting that draws heavily on Campbell to provide a
road map for writers wanting to construct a hero's journey in film scripts.
The author, Vogler, believes most popular films strike a deep cord with
audiences precisely because they are based around such a hero's journey.
To illustrate the mythical arc of a typical hero's journey, Vogler tells the
story of The Seekers. I am sharing The Seekers here as it seem to me to
powerfully describe the mythical journey undertaken by initiates before,
during and after the NWTA, and affirms the timeless and universal resonances
of the training.
The Seekers
The Ordinary World
Look around, sister, brother of the Home Tribe. You can see the people are
barely getting by, surviving on a dwindling supply of last season's food.
Times are bad and the country all around seems lifeless. The people grow
weak before our eyes, but a few of us are filled with restless energy. Like
you. You're uncomfortable, feeling you no longer fit in with this drab,
exhausted place. You may not know it, but you're soon to be selected as a
hero, to join the select company of the Seekers, those who have always gone
out to face the unknown. You'll undertake a journey to restore life and
health to the entire Home Tribe, an adventure in which the only sure thing
is that you'll be changed. You're uneasy, but there's a thrill running
through you. You're poised to break free from this world, ready to enter the
world of adventure.
The Call To Adventure
Trouble shadows the Home Tribe. You hear its call, in the grumbling of our
stomach and the cries of our hungry children. The land for miles around is
tapped out and barren and clearly someone must go beyond the familiar
territory. That unknown land is strange and fills us with fear, but pressure
mounts to do something, to take some risks, so that life can continue.
A figure emerges from the campfire smoke, an elder of the Home Tribe,
pointing to you. Yes, you have been chosen as a Seeker and called to begin a
new quest. You'll venture your life so that the greater life of the Home
Tribe may go on.
Refusal Of The Call
Gather your gear, fellow Seeker. Think ahead to possible dangers, and
reflect on past disasters. The spectre of the unknown walks among us,
halting our progress at the threshold. Some of us turn down the quest, some
hesitate, some are tugged at by families who fear for our lives and don't
want us to go. You hear people mutter that the journey is foolhardy, doomed
from the start. You feel fear constricting your breathing and making your
heart race. Should you stay with the Home Tribe, and let others risk their
necks in the quest ? Are you cut out to be a Seeker ?
Meeting With The Mentor
You Seekers, fearful at the brink of adventure, consult with the elders of
the Home Tribe. Seek out those who have gone before. Learn the secret lore
of watering holes, games trails, and berry patches, and what badlands,
quicksand, and monsters to avoid. An old one, feeble to go out again,
scratches a map for us in the dirt. The shaman of the tribe presses
something into your hand, a magic gift, a potent talisman that will protect
us and guide us on the quest. Now we can set out with lighter hearts and
greater confidence, for we take with us the collected wisdom of the Home
Tribe.
Crossing The First Threshold
The ranks of the Seekers are thinner now. Some of us have dropped out, but
the final few are ready to cross the threshold and truly begin the
adventure. The problems of the Home Tribe are clear to everyone, and
desperate - something must be done, now ! Ready or not, we lope out of the
village leaving all things familiar behind. As you pull away you feel the
jerk of the invisible threads that bind you to your loved ones. It's
difficult to pull away from everything you know but with a deep breath you
go on, taking the plunge into the abyss of the unknown. We enter a strange
no-man's-land, a world between worlds, a zone of crossing that may be
desolate and lonely. Or, in places, crowded with life. You sense the
presence of other beings, other forces with sharp thorns or claws, guarding
the way to the treasure you seek. But there's no turning back now, we all
feel it; the adventure has begun for good or ill.
Tests, Allies, Enemies
We Seekers are in shock - this new world is so different from the home we've
always known. Not only are the terrain and the local residents different,
the rules of this place are strange as they can be. Different things are
valued here and we have a lot to learn about the local currency, customs,
and language. Strange creatures jump out at you! Think fast! Don't eat that,
it could be poison! Exhausted by the journey across the desolate threshold
zone, we're running out of time and energy. Remember our people back in the
Home Tribe are counting on us. Enough sight-seeing, let's concentrate on the
goal. We must go where the food and game and information are to be found.
There our skills will be tested, and we'll come one step closer to what we
seek.
Approach To The Inmost Cave
Our band of Seekers leaves the oasis at the edge of the new world, refreshed
and armed with more knowledge about the nature and habits of the game we're
hunting. We're ready press on to the heart of the new world where the
greatest treasures are guarded by our greatest fears. Look around at your
fellow Seekers. We've changed already and new qualities are emerging. Who's
the leader now? Some who were not suited for life in the Ordinary World are
now thriving. Others who seemed ideal for adventure are turning out to be
the least able. A new perception of yourself and others is forming. Based on
this new awareness, you can make plans and direct yourself towards getting
what you want from the Special World. Soon you will be ready to enter the
Inmost Cave.
The Ordeal
Seeker, enter the Inmost Cave and look for that which will restore life to
the Home Tribe. The way grows narrow and dark. You must go alone on hands
and knees and you feel the earth press close around you. You can hardly
breathe. Suddenly you come out into the deepest chamber and find yourself
face-to-face with a towering figure, a menacing Shadow composed of all your
doubts and fears and well armed to defend a treasure. Here, in this moment,
is the chance to win all or die. No matter what you came for, it's Death
that now stares back at you. Whatever the outcome of the battle, you are
about to taste death and it will change you.
Reward
We Seekers look at one another with growing smiles. We've won the right to
be called heroes. For the sake of the Home Tribe we faced death, tasted it,
and yet lived. From the depths of terror we suddenly shoot up to victory.
It's time to fill our empty bellies and raise our voices around the campfire
to sing of our deeds. Old wounds and grievances are forgotten. The story of
our journey is already being woven. You pull apart from the rest, strangely
quiet. In the leaping shadows you remember those who didn't make it, and you
notice something. You're different. You've changed. Part of you has died and
something new has been born. You and the world will never seem the same.
This too is part of the Reward for facing death.
The Road Back
Wake up, Seekers! Shake off the effects of our feast and celebration and
remember why we came out here in the first place! People back home are
starving and it's urgent, now that we've recovered from the ordeal, to load
up our backpacks with food and treasure and head for home. Besides, there's
no telling what dangers still lurk on the edge on the hunting grounds. You
pause at the edge of camp to look back. They'll never believe this back
home. How to tell them? Something bright on the ground catches your eyes.
You bend to pick it up - a beautiful smooth stone with an inner glow.
Suddenly a dark shape darts out at you, all fangs. Run! Run for your life!
The Resurrection
We weary Seekers shuffle back towards the village. Look! The smoke of the
Home Tribe fires! Pick up the pace! But wait - the shaman appears to stop us
from charging back in. You have been to the land of the Death, he says, and
you look like death itself, covered in blood, carrying the torn flesh and
hide of your game. If you march back into the village without purifying and
cleansing yourselves, you may bring death back with you. You must undergo
one final sacrifice before rejoining the tribe. Your warriors self must die
so you can be reborn as an innocent into the group. The trick is to keep the
wisdom of the Ordeal, while getting rid of its bad effects. After all we've
been through, fellow Seekers, we must face one more trial, maybe the hardest
one yet.
Return With The Elixir
We Seekers come home at last, purged, purified, and bearing the fruits of
our journey. We share out the nourishment and treasure among the Home Tribe,
with many a good story about how they were won. A circle has been closed,
you can feel it. You can see that our struggles on the Road of Heroes have
brought new life to our land. There will be other adventures, but this one
is complete, and as it ends it brings deep healing, wellness, and wholeness
to our world. The Seekers have come Home.
From: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
By Christopher Vogler
David Wicht
c +27 83 254 3777 h +27 21 795 5698
1 Old Cottage Rd Silverhurst
Constantia 7806 South Africa
Monday, May 30, 2011
Serving, not helping or fixing
Thank you Brother Peter Mayson for sending me this text from the Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996.
In the Service of Life
In recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many
people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps
the real question is not how can I help? but how can I serve?
Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not
a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to
help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on inside of
me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who's not as
strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality. When
we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever
give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth,
integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But
we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all
of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our
darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and
the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in
me. Service is a relationship between equals.
Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving,
like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am
serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a
feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.
Serving is also different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive them
as broken, and their brokenness requires me to act. When I fix I do not see
the wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in
them. When I serve I see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am
responding to and collaborating with.
There is distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing.
Fixing is a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a
disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality
of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a
distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that
which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We
serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery
and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery,
surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server knows
that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be used in the service
of something greater, something essentially unknown. Fixing and helping are
very personal; they are very particular, concrete and specific. We fix and
help many different things in our lifetimes, but when we serve we are always
serving the same thing. Everyone who has ever served through the history of
time serves the same thing. We are servers of the wholeness and mystery in
life.
The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix without serving. And we can
help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. I think I
would go so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be the work of
the ego, and service the work of the soul. They may look similar if you're
watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different. The
outcome is often different, too.
Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us.
Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn
out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us.
Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that
life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know
that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing
and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak,
when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.
>From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like
my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges
naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.
Lastly, fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but not of healing. In
40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed by a
great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and
helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service
heals.
Reprinted from Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996
Peter Mayson
Analyst Programmer
GT - Retail Product Technology
Nedbank Wealth
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
57 Heerengracht, Cape Town
Tel:+27 (0)21 412 3913
In the Service of Life
In recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many
people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps
the real question is not how can I help? but how can I serve?
Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not
a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to
help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on inside of
me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who's not as
strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality. When
we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever
give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth,
integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But
we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all
of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our
darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and
the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in
me. Service is a relationship between equals.
Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving,
like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am
serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a
feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.
Serving is also different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive them
as broken, and their brokenness requires me to act. When I fix I do not see
the wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in
them. When I serve I see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am
responding to and collaborating with.
There is distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing.
Fixing is a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a
disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality
of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a
distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that
which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We
serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery
and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery,
surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server knows
that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be used in the service
of something greater, something essentially unknown. Fixing and helping are
very personal; they are very particular, concrete and specific. We fix and
help many different things in our lifetimes, but when we serve we are always
serving the same thing. Everyone who has ever served through the history of
time serves the same thing. We are servers of the wholeness and mystery in
life.
The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix without serving. And we can
help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. I think I
would go so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be the work of
the ego, and service the work of the soul. They may look similar if you're
watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different. The
outcome is often different, too.
Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us.
Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn
out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us.
Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that
life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know
that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing
and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak,
when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.
>From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like
my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges
naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.
Lastly, fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but not of healing. In
40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed by a
great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and
helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service
heals.
Reprinted from Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996
Peter Mayson
Analyst Programmer
GT - Retail Product Technology
Nedbank Wealth
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
57 Heerengracht, Cape Town
Tel:+27 (0)21 412 3913
Ideas about Dying Elders
Elders,
Picked up the newspaper this morning and found this article and thought it may spark something to provoke some thought within us.
Blessings,
Gary L. Parker
"Blessing Eagle"
THINGS TO TALK ABOUT WITH CAREGIVERS BEFORE YOU DIE
By Theadora Davitt-Cornyn
Friday, September 18, 2009
“For many years, the Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship has had training programs for lay ministry, and just as in professional ministry, part of that involves preparation for one’s own celebration of life ceremony, complete with music and readings, as well as addressing issues around end-of-life questions such as those being discussed in the media right now.
Included are topics like living wills, medical power of attorney, advanced medical directives and so on.
I have also included my own preferences for pain management and hospice care, should that be necessary, and should I be incapable of making my wishes known. The below are borrowed from Kevin Drewery, a dear seminarian who just passed away much too soon very recently:
It is my desire to be comfortable. If I cannot communicate with my doctor, family or friends, then I want my attorney-in-fact, family and friends to know the following:
— I ask that medical treatment to alleviate pain, to provide comfort, and to mitigate suffering be provided so that I may be as free of pain and suffering as possible.
— If my temperature is above normal, I want a cool, moist cloth put on my head.
— I want my mouth and lips kept moist.
- I need to be kept fresh and clean at all times.
— I desire to be massaged with or without warm oils as often as you think will help maintain my skin integrity and provide for my comfort.
— I want to have my favorite music played when possible.
— I want my personal care such as nail clipping, hair combing and teeth brushing and shaving as long as they do not cause me pain.
— I want to have religious readings read to me when I am near death.
— I hope my family and friends would consider that:
— I enjoy your company and want you with me when possible. I desire that one of you stay with me when it seems that my death may be imminent.
— Please continue to talk to me about daily happenings and events even if you think I don’t understand, because I might be able to understand.
— Please don’t be afraid to hold my hand or hug me.
And I added that — at death, if possible, I would prefer to have family and friends stay nearby me for as long as that seems appropriate. Additionally, I soon intend to add new information from my seminary years about the Threshhold Acapella Choir to be on hand if possible, as well as information about the availability of “green burials,” all in the Bay Area.
I realize this conversation might be very uncomfortable for some, but there will come a time inevitably for each of us that we would like to have prepared for, yet, without planning, we may not get that chance. I would encourage folks to have those communications with loved ones and doctors long before the need ever arises.
In gratitude for Social Security, Medicare, all the good doctors, nurses, hospitals and hospice care our society offers.”
— Theadora Davitt-Cornyn lives in Oxnard.
Gary,
I really like this article. As a hospice chaplain, I have a couple issues with it.
I find that towards the end, our patients are spending more time on "the other side" than on "this side". It's like they brighten up like they are invited to a wonderful party and they are getting ready to go. I think that there is a common error at the end where family members (by their touch and their presence) keep their loved one connected to this side, when the truth is that the dying one is ready to go.
That's why my experience is that most deaths occur when a loved one goes out to have a cigarette or to take a pee. They come back to find their loved one dead - usually they feel guilty for abandoning the vigil and leaving their loved one alone... when really, that's what the dying person is waiting for - a chance to die without an audience -
I think that dying is private like going to the bathroom is private. Anyway other than that, I really like what your friend has to say about dying a good death, and setting it up in a good way.
Loving you, and my best to Jen.
Ken Plattner
This is insightful. One thing the Elderly have is experiences. Sharing these such as Ken did is invaluable
Recently I have spent hours in a variety of waiting rooms in oncology, radiation and cancer treatment centers. Interfacing with medical professionals and observing their interaction with seriously ill patients is added to, by this insight.
My wife and I discuss the what ifs around this inevitability called death. Updating wills and the desires around physical assets is important. In this time of fractional families, from divorce or death this question can result in disputes between heirs. We want to avoid this. I call this personal responsibility. I have learned that two unexpected emotions show up after a person dies, Greed and Anger. We chose to be aware of this and do everything possible to ameliorate this possibility.
During this time of great emotion by all...(except the departed, I believe) pressure is on to accomplish the necessary. This involves the services, celebration of life and as we have seen recently at the national level, the sainthood of the departed.
Someone, despite their grief, has to be in charge I realized this when my second wife died suddenly at age 39. Fathers, mothers, children were distraught. The funeral process, autopsies and necessary functions had to be handled. My time to grief was after these functions were taken care of, usually late at night. I knew it was important to have a process where her 3 younger children and my four could handle this surprise in their lives. I faced that with my own mother when nine so has some insight about their needs.
I learned that humor is inevitable during this process. I recall the seedy casket salesman trying to sell our young charges the $25,000 solid bronze casket as they ran around the display room shopping for their mother. Seeing humor helped my keep my head on straight during this process.
Supporting my wife when she had to move through this loss of her parents give me insight when hospice or care facilities are involved. Time to plan is available in that situation.
Everyone's situation is different during these times. I believe being responsible transcends our own demise and is best handled before the fact. Ken's input to state our desires is part of that responsibility.
Red "Soul Bear " Fraser
Ken,
I agree with you that often loved ones are present and the one dying feels like he/she can't let them go, that they need him/her.
On the other hand, I have talked with folks who have had loved ones die, particularly parents, and they tell their parent that it is okay to go now; that they will take care of anything back here and they are free to go. There are lots of ways to say that to the one dying. I like that model to openly give permission to the person to die.
Allan
I understand what Ken wrote. I haven't got such a big experience as he has. But for what I have lived, I agree totally with you, my dear Alan. I remember when my mother died. I had the feeling she did not want to go as long we did not "give her this permission”. She was already supposed to be unconscious and I spoke to her saying "It' s now the time to go Mum; don't worry about us and don't worry about Dad, we, your four children, shall take care of him, you know we shall do that; You're ready now to go, just go to the light and to meet all those who have passed before you". She died very peacefully some hours later.
François
I agree - Bless you both Francois AND Allan. Allow me for a moment to put on my Hospice Training Hat.
The experience that Allan and Francois had is fantastic... and it is somewhat unusual. Although not surprising, because most people who want to die at home are ready to have a good death. And it is a great thing when dying people AND their families choose to have a conscious experience.
Here is the conventional wisdom of what happens at death... It's as different as the number of people who go through the experience. What I have listed here is like a guideline or a roadmap of the Final Hours. Like any map, there are many roads arriving at the same destination - there are many ways to enter the same city.
Death by it's very nature takes most people into a withdrawn and solitary space. That is the norm. There is no longer any interest in eating or drinking. There is increased perspiration, often with clamminess. Skin color changes and nail beds on the hands and feet are often pale and bluish because the heart is not able to circulate blood flow at the normal rate
Then comes one last enlivening surge of what often appears like normal energy (sometimes the person will even ask for a meal) After this surge usually comes the final hours. It is not uncommon for the dying person to drop into non-responsiveness - Then comes these other responses:
* Intensification of disorientation - agitation, talking to the unseen, confusion, picking at air or clothing
* Decrease in blood pressure
* Eyes glassy, tearing, half open
* Restlessness OR no activity
* Purplish blotchy modeled feet, legs and hands
* Pulse weak and hard to find
* Decreased urine output
* May wet or soil the bed
With only minutes before death:
* "Fish out of water" breathing
* Can not be awakened
The separation becomes complete when breathing stops. What appears to be the last breath is often followed by one or two long spaced breaths and then the physical body is empty. The owner is no longer in need of a heavy, nonfunctioning vehicle.
They have entered a new city and a new life.
My wish for all of us is that we will have the kind of death that Francois describes. It's a beautiful thing to daily practice dying, so that when our time comes, it will be no problem to let go, bless our loved ones, and take our leave.
In Love and Service,
Ken Plattner
Ken, thanks for the awareness offering about the last stages before death occurs. It takes some of the fear of the unknown out of it for me.
I work as a pharmacist part of the time and facilitate self-healing work on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. So, I'm aware of both sides-
Something that opened my eyes to the perfection in completion that death can be was a book- The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rimpoche. Even though the title may have an impact, I urge those interested to read it- It doesn't make a difference if you're Buddhist or not- he explains each of the stages of dying in a compassionate and understandable way and gave me alot of understanding and lessened my fear greatly.
The most helpful thing we can do for the dying is to love then and keep them peaceful as best we can- then we are truly serving them.
Blessings to all,
Steve Pollock (Sacred Gold,nBlack Eagle)
Ken, I worked as a hospice volunteer for about 3 years. They worried about who to hook me up with because of my tattoos and this being a small town in the wilds of British Columbia. The first guy was a chuck wagon racer but we got along great. When he was in his death throws, his two adult sons were there to say goodbye. They smelled of horses and hay and had that men don't cry attitude. I stood on the other side of the bed. I took their Dad's hand and slowly they took their Dad's other hand. I started to grieve because I was filled with their unexpressed sadness. They followed suit with big unexpected tears. I could feel how embarrassed they were about letting out their emotions which they kept reined in tight just like the horses. All three of them were champion chuck wagon racers.
The second person, Clara, was an 80-year-old woman who'd been in a dance band. She taught me to play crib all over again. During the year of visiting her, she went from her home to a senior lodge to the hospital. Towards the end she told me, "I love you, ya know?" On her deathbed, she was in a coma of sorts gasping her last breaths. She opened her eyes one last time and gave me such a loving look and a big smile I felt bad for her daughter who had come a long ways to see her Mom. She didn't even look at her daughter and then immediately died.
Manny
Thanks, Manny. Being a whole man often enables others to find more of themselves, even if they smell of hay and horses (good smells, by the way).
Ed Alley
MY brother Elders,
Reading this posting makes me more proud to be an initiated man. WE are changing how men react to pain and sorrow.
Here is my piece. When my father died two years ago there was much confusion around his sudden death. I will say this about those days. That was the saddest time I have ever experienced. I pointed out to those who could not and did not spend much time with him that he had been ill for a long time. He was hiding it he thought. His dementia kept him from thinking clearly about treatment. His mind would tell him we will do something about this tomorrow and when tomorrow came it was the same thing over and over. The doctor told me this . I am not educated enough in medicine to know those facts.
My mother was is great denial about his sickness and ignored the obvious signs. When he died he was sitting in a chair with my mother holding him. He died in her arms. After his death She would not listen to the doctor's that he had been out so long without oxygen to his brain that there was no chance of him recovering. HE would have had to be on life support for as long as God wanted him to be here.
She refused to turn of the life saving machines. When the machine breathed for him his body would constrict very stiff and exhale fiercely. . It took four long days watching him before my mother finally gave up and turned off life support. The DR. said after disconnecting it would be a few hours before he would take his last breath and pass. IT took12 hours before his spirit left his body. In my judgment it came after my mother said to him "its Ok I will be alright, rest in peace and I will see you heaven.".
There were members of my family that was not taking time to visit Dad Each of them could not go into his room to talk much less touch him . I could see the Guilt in their faces and I felt very sad for them. Right before the unplugging I was asked by our pastor to say a final piece. I did and could not stop crying during my piece. Many members of my family said that I was taking his death very hard. NO I was showing how much I loved him and how much I treasured our times together. I so loved my father and already missed him terribly. This was the saddest time of my life so far.
This experience is something I will not put my family through. I have a living will and it states that if the doctors declare me brain dead to un plug all life support and let me pass peacefully.
This has been the first time I have talked about his passing since he died.
Thanks Manny for this opportunity to share. Ed Fileccia.
An amazing teaching piece
Why don't more people get this?
Evan
Ed,
You said: "This experience is something I will not put my family through. I have a living will and it states that if the doctors declare me brain dead to un-plug all life support and let me pass peacefully."
I want to offer the following to consider - as a retired neurosurgeon I, all too often, was in the role of "the doctor," approaching the family to make that last decision. You alluded to the many family members "who could not and did not spend much time with him." In my experience, they are the problem. The guilt these people feel usually prompts them to ask that "everything possible be done," even if it goes against the dying persons wishes. The discord this creates in the family causes the patient to be left on the machine far longer than would be appropriate. The ones who support the dying persons wishes usually defer to those who speak loudly to continue all efforts.
The solution? If we really want to spare our families and loved ones this agony we must talk to them NOW, let them know how we feel and how much we love them, and how we want things to end. Tell them that they will be acting out of LOVE and not GUILT.
Remember, the actions called for in a living will can be nullified by the request of the survivors.
John Lindermuth
White Swan
Picked up the newspaper this morning and found this article and thought it may spark something to provoke some thought within us.
Blessings,
Gary L. Parker
"Blessing Eagle"
THINGS TO TALK ABOUT WITH CAREGIVERS BEFORE YOU DIE
By Theadora Davitt-Cornyn
Friday, September 18, 2009
“For many years, the Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship has had training programs for lay ministry, and just as in professional ministry, part of that involves preparation for one’s own celebration of life ceremony, complete with music and readings, as well as addressing issues around end-of-life questions such as those being discussed in the media right now.
Included are topics like living wills, medical power of attorney, advanced medical directives and so on.
I have also included my own preferences for pain management and hospice care, should that be necessary, and should I be incapable of making my wishes known. The below are borrowed from Kevin Drewery, a dear seminarian who just passed away much too soon very recently:
It is my desire to be comfortable. If I cannot communicate with my doctor, family or friends, then I want my attorney-in-fact, family and friends to know the following:
— I ask that medical treatment to alleviate pain, to provide comfort, and to mitigate suffering be provided so that I may be as free of pain and suffering as possible.
— If my temperature is above normal, I want a cool, moist cloth put on my head.
— I want my mouth and lips kept moist.
- I need to be kept fresh and clean at all times.
— I desire to be massaged with or without warm oils as often as you think will help maintain my skin integrity and provide for my comfort.
— I want to have my favorite music played when possible.
— I want my personal care such as nail clipping, hair combing and teeth brushing and shaving as long as they do not cause me pain.
— I want to have religious readings read to me when I am near death.
— I hope my family and friends would consider that:
— I enjoy your company and want you with me when possible. I desire that one of you stay with me when it seems that my death may be imminent.
— Please continue to talk to me about daily happenings and events even if you think I don’t understand, because I might be able to understand.
— Please don’t be afraid to hold my hand or hug me.
And I added that — at death, if possible, I would prefer to have family and friends stay nearby me for as long as that seems appropriate. Additionally, I soon intend to add new information from my seminary years about the Threshhold Acapella Choir to be on hand if possible, as well as information about the availability of “green burials,” all in the Bay Area.
I realize this conversation might be very uncomfortable for some, but there will come a time inevitably for each of us that we would like to have prepared for, yet, without planning, we may not get that chance. I would encourage folks to have those communications with loved ones and doctors long before the need ever arises.
In gratitude for Social Security, Medicare, all the good doctors, nurses, hospitals and hospice care our society offers.”
— Theadora Davitt-Cornyn lives in Oxnard.
Gary,
I really like this article. As a hospice chaplain, I have a couple issues with it.
I find that towards the end, our patients are spending more time on "the other side" than on "this side". It's like they brighten up like they are invited to a wonderful party and they are getting ready to go. I think that there is a common error at the end where family members (by their touch and their presence) keep their loved one connected to this side, when the truth is that the dying one is ready to go.
That's why my experience is that most deaths occur when a loved one goes out to have a cigarette or to take a pee. They come back to find their loved one dead - usually they feel guilty for abandoning the vigil and leaving their loved one alone... when really, that's what the dying person is waiting for - a chance to die without an audience -
I think that dying is private like going to the bathroom is private. Anyway other than that, I really like what your friend has to say about dying a good death, and setting it up in a good way.
Loving you, and my best to Jen.
Ken Plattner
This is insightful. One thing the Elderly have is experiences. Sharing these such as Ken did is invaluable
Recently I have spent hours in a variety of waiting rooms in oncology, radiation and cancer treatment centers. Interfacing with medical professionals and observing their interaction with seriously ill patients is added to, by this insight.
My wife and I discuss the what ifs around this inevitability called death. Updating wills and the desires around physical assets is important. In this time of fractional families, from divorce or death this question can result in disputes between heirs. We want to avoid this. I call this personal responsibility. I have learned that two unexpected emotions show up after a person dies, Greed and Anger. We chose to be aware of this and do everything possible to ameliorate this possibility.
During this time of great emotion by all...(except the departed, I believe) pressure is on to accomplish the necessary. This involves the services, celebration of life and as we have seen recently at the national level, the sainthood of the departed.
Someone, despite their grief, has to be in charge I realized this when my second wife died suddenly at age 39. Fathers, mothers, children were distraught. The funeral process, autopsies and necessary functions had to be handled. My time to grief was after these functions were taken care of, usually late at night. I knew it was important to have a process where her 3 younger children and my four could handle this surprise in their lives. I faced that with my own mother when nine so has some insight about their needs.
I learned that humor is inevitable during this process. I recall the seedy casket salesman trying to sell our young charges the $25,000 solid bronze casket as they ran around the display room shopping for their mother. Seeing humor helped my keep my head on straight during this process.
Supporting my wife when she had to move through this loss of her parents give me insight when hospice or care facilities are involved. Time to plan is available in that situation.
Everyone's situation is different during these times. I believe being responsible transcends our own demise and is best handled before the fact. Ken's input to state our desires is part of that responsibility.
Red "Soul Bear " Fraser
Ken,
I agree with you that often loved ones are present and the one dying feels like he/she can't let them go, that they need him/her.
On the other hand, I have talked with folks who have had loved ones die, particularly parents, and they tell their parent that it is okay to go now; that they will take care of anything back here and they are free to go. There are lots of ways to say that to the one dying. I like that model to openly give permission to the person to die.
Allan
I understand what Ken wrote. I haven't got such a big experience as he has. But for what I have lived, I agree totally with you, my dear Alan. I remember when my mother died. I had the feeling she did not want to go as long we did not "give her this permission”. She was already supposed to be unconscious and I spoke to her saying "It' s now the time to go Mum; don't worry about us and don't worry about Dad, we, your four children, shall take care of him, you know we shall do that; You're ready now to go, just go to the light and to meet all those who have passed before you". She died very peacefully some hours later.
François
I agree - Bless you both Francois AND Allan. Allow me for a moment to put on my Hospice Training Hat.
The experience that Allan and Francois had is fantastic... and it is somewhat unusual. Although not surprising, because most people who want to die at home are ready to have a good death. And it is a great thing when dying people AND their families choose to have a conscious experience.
Here is the conventional wisdom of what happens at death... It's as different as the number of people who go through the experience. What I have listed here is like a guideline or a roadmap of the Final Hours. Like any map, there are many roads arriving at the same destination - there are many ways to enter the same city.
Death by it's very nature takes most people into a withdrawn and solitary space. That is the norm. There is no longer any interest in eating or drinking. There is increased perspiration, often with clamminess. Skin color changes and nail beds on the hands and feet are often pale and bluish because the heart is not able to circulate blood flow at the normal rate
Then comes one last enlivening surge of what often appears like normal energy (sometimes the person will even ask for a meal) After this surge usually comes the final hours. It is not uncommon for the dying person to drop into non-responsiveness - Then comes these other responses:
* Intensification of disorientation - agitation, talking to the unseen, confusion, picking at air or clothing
* Decrease in blood pressure
* Eyes glassy, tearing, half open
* Restlessness OR no activity
* Purplish blotchy modeled feet, legs and hands
* Pulse weak and hard to find
* Decreased urine output
* May wet or soil the bed
With only minutes before death:
* "Fish out of water" breathing
* Can not be awakened
The separation becomes complete when breathing stops. What appears to be the last breath is often followed by one or two long spaced breaths and then the physical body is empty. The owner is no longer in need of a heavy, nonfunctioning vehicle.
They have entered a new city and a new life.
My wish for all of us is that we will have the kind of death that Francois describes. It's a beautiful thing to daily practice dying, so that when our time comes, it will be no problem to let go, bless our loved ones, and take our leave.
In Love and Service,
Ken Plattner
Ken, thanks for the awareness offering about the last stages before death occurs. It takes some of the fear of the unknown out of it for me.
I work as a pharmacist part of the time and facilitate self-healing work on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. So, I'm aware of both sides-
Something that opened my eyes to the perfection in completion that death can be was a book- The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rimpoche. Even though the title may have an impact, I urge those interested to read it- It doesn't make a difference if you're Buddhist or not- he explains each of the stages of dying in a compassionate and understandable way and gave me alot of understanding and lessened my fear greatly.
The most helpful thing we can do for the dying is to love then and keep them peaceful as best we can- then we are truly serving them.
Blessings to all,
Steve Pollock (Sacred Gold,nBlack Eagle)
Ken, I worked as a hospice volunteer for about 3 years. They worried about who to hook me up with because of my tattoos and this being a small town in the wilds of British Columbia. The first guy was a chuck wagon racer but we got along great. When he was in his death throws, his two adult sons were there to say goodbye. They smelled of horses and hay and had that men don't cry attitude. I stood on the other side of the bed. I took their Dad's hand and slowly they took their Dad's other hand. I started to grieve because I was filled with their unexpressed sadness. They followed suit with big unexpected tears. I could feel how embarrassed they were about letting out their emotions which they kept reined in tight just like the horses. All three of them were champion chuck wagon racers.
The second person, Clara, was an 80-year-old woman who'd been in a dance band. She taught me to play crib all over again. During the year of visiting her, she went from her home to a senior lodge to the hospital. Towards the end she told me, "I love you, ya know?" On her deathbed, she was in a coma of sorts gasping her last breaths. She opened her eyes one last time and gave me such a loving look and a big smile I felt bad for her daughter who had come a long ways to see her Mom. She didn't even look at her daughter and then immediately died.
Manny
Thanks, Manny. Being a whole man often enables others to find more of themselves, even if they smell of hay and horses (good smells, by the way).
Ed Alley
MY brother Elders,
Reading this posting makes me more proud to be an initiated man. WE are changing how men react to pain and sorrow.
Here is my piece. When my father died two years ago there was much confusion around his sudden death. I will say this about those days. That was the saddest time I have ever experienced. I pointed out to those who could not and did not spend much time with him that he had been ill for a long time. He was hiding it he thought. His dementia kept him from thinking clearly about treatment. His mind would tell him we will do something about this tomorrow and when tomorrow came it was the same thing over and over. The doctor told me this . I am not educated enough in medicine to know those facts.
My mother was is great denial about his sickness and ignored the obvious signs. When he died he was sitting in a chair with my mother holding him. He died in her arms. After his death She would not listen to the doctor's that he had been out so long without oxygen to his brain that there was no chance of him recovering. HE would have had to be on life support for as long as God wanted him to be here.
She refused to turn of the life saving machines. When the machine breathed for him his body would constrict very stiff and exhale fiercely. . It took four long days watching him before my mother finally gave up and turned off life support. The DR. said after disconnecting it would be a few hours before he would take his last breath and pass. IT took12 hours before his spirit left his body. In my judgment it came after my mother said to him "its Ok I will be alright, rest in peace and I will see you heaven.".
There were members of my family that was not taking time to visit Dad Each of them could not go into his room to talk much less touch him . I could see the Guilt in their faces and I felt very sad for them. Right before the unplugging I was asked by our pastor to say a final piece. I did and could not stop crying during my piece. Many members of my family said that I was taking his death very hard. NO I was showing how much I loved him and how much I treasured our times together. I so loved my father and already missed him terribly. This was the saddest time of my life so far.
This experience is something I will not put my family through. I have a living will and it states that if the doctors declare me brain dead to un plug all life support and let me pass peacefully.
This has been the first time I have talked about his passing since he died.
Thanks Manny for this opportunity to share. Ed Fileccia.
An amazing teaching piece
Why don't more people get this?
Evan
Ed,
You said: "This experience is something I will not put my family through. I have a living will and it states that if the doctors declare me brain dead to un-plug all life support and let me pass peacefully."
I want to offer the following to consider - as a retired neurosurgeon I, all too often, was in the role of "the doctor," approaching the family to make that last decision. You alluded to the many family members "who could not and did not spend much time with him." In my experience, they are the problem. The guilt these people feel usually prompts them to ask that "everything possible be done," even if it goes against the dying persons wishes. The discord this creates in the family causes the patient to be left on the machine far longer than would be appropriate. The ones who support the dying persons wishes usually defer to those who speak loudly to continue all efforts.
The solution? If we really want to spare our families and loved ones this agony we must talk to them NOW, let them know how we feel and how much we love them, and how we want things to end. Tell them that they will be acting out of LOVE and not GUILT.
Remember, the actions called for in a living will can be nullified by the request of the survivors.
John Lindermuth
White Swan
Elder Shadow poem
Elder shadow Poem (aka Falling Shorts)
strong lover got me here...
who learned to feel happiness
without needing the drugs
without the perfect sunset
the beautiful woman
the handsome reflection
in the mirror...
and the shadow that throws is the Hermit
be greedy for happiness
build walls, keep it to yourself
avoid interaction
lock yourself up with all that’s good
and throw away the key
and if happiness depends on nothing external
this gives rise also to Nowhere Man
who sees no point in its pursuit
and lacks all ambition in his heart
have no direction, be what happens
let the world wash thru, become what you see...
strong magician got me here...
finding a safe path thru, sometimes
being where trouble wasn’t...
the shadow that throws is Smallness
maybe so small, death wont notice i’m here
but then maybe life wont either...
and strong magician knew
how powerfully the ideas universe mirrors the real...
how much magic, how much gift, holding a new album in his hands
Trapped Merlin is the shadow of that understanding
lost in the crystal cave of the endless repetition
distraction, inventiveness
the illusion of TV and media
controllling him
strong warrior got me here
loneliness, depression, selfabsorbtion
early life threatening illness, addiction
and many more deadends and opportunities
all fought, all on his own
inner warrior
and the shadow of that vigilance
is The Guardian (the Two of Swords)
who wont let anything threaten
who guards only the self
who wont show up if there’s charge
and accusation in the air...
nothing must harm his charge
and the king...
in his growing old age
supposed to be slowly and surely
becoming the epitome of wisdom
the firmest of handshakes
with an answer for everyone’s pain...
my king throws many shadows
the Mad Monarch
fears his own mind’s deterioration
the King in Exile
wants that he be still young
the King Whose Heart is Stone
has no feelings to give
to the news he reads...
he notes the awful detail
and turns the page
The Wounded King
blames the world for death
blames himself for his own
falling shorts
blames everyone else for theirs...
and The Dreaming King
much like Trapped Merlin
but in a more knowing way
would really rather not know
x dp
David Pugsly’s poem ‘Elder Shadow'
strong lover got me here...
who learned to feel happiness
without needing the drugs
without the perfect sunset
the beautiful woman
the handsome reflection
in the mirror...
and the shadow that throws is the Hermit
be greedy for happiness
build walls, keep it to yourself
avoid interaction
lock yourself up with all that’s good
and throw away the key
and if happiness depends on nothing external
this gives rise also to Nowhere Man
who sees no point in its pursuit
and lacks all ambition in his heart
have no direction, be what happens
let the world wash thru, become what you see...
strong magician got me here...
finding a safe path thru, sometimes
being where trouble wasn’t...
the shadow that throws is Smallness
maybe so small, death wont notice i’m here
but then maybe life wont either...
and strong magician knew
how powerfully the ideas universe mirrors the real...
how much magic, how much gift, holding a new album in his hands
Trapped Merlin is the shadow of that understanding
lost in the crystal cave of the endless repetition
distraction, inventiveness
the illusion of TV and media
controllling him
strong warrior got me here
loneliness, depression, selfabsorbtion
early life threatening illness, addiction
and many more deadends and opportunities
all fought, all on his own
inner warrior
and the shadow of that vigilance
is The Guardian (the Two of Swords)
who wont let anything threaten
who guards only the self
who wont show up if there’s charge
and accusation in the air...
nothing must harm his charge
and the king...
in his growing old age
supposed to be slowly and surely
becoming the epitome of wisdom
the firmest of handshakes
with an answer for everyone’s pain...
my king throws many shadows
the Mad Monarch
fears his own mind’s deterioration
the King in Exile
wants that he be still young
the King Whose Heart is Stone
has no feelings to give
to the news he reads...
he notes the awful detail
and turns the page
The Wounded King
blames the world for death
blames himself for his own
falling shorts
blames everyone else for theirs...
and The Dreaming King
much like Trapped Merlin
but in a more knowing way
would really rather not know
x dp
David Pugsly’s poem ‘Elder Shadow'
Monday, February 28, 2011
My masculinity
Being in doubt about my masculinity always produced an awful feeling of fear deep inside. A feeling I kept hidden, negated and repressed. Imagine being a man and in the eyes of other men and women...not being a masculine man! Imagine the constant fear and sometimes the panic!
Aproaching the age of seventy I look back and feel blessed with my journey of personal development.
A while ago I met my friend Hilda and her new partner Charles. A few years ago I got to know Hilda at the start of a Tai Chi course and since then we both enjoy attending the classes.
Shaking hands with Charles I asked him when he would be joining us for Tai Chi classes.
He averted his eyes, smiled awkwardly and answered: "I do not have any tights".
Having exchanged some small-talk I walked on, thinking about what Charles had said.
In his eyes and body language I had noticed the fear of a shy man.
For him practicing Tai Chi is something for sissies and the last thing he wants, is to look like a sissy. He wants to be considered a real man. Obviously he did not know that Tai Chi is a form of disguised martial arts. Later I saw Charles driving what could be called a "special" red car with a fancy steering wheel, lots of stickers, a noisy exhaust pipe, white stripes running over the red body and large tyres.
It reminded me of the question a former girlfriend once asked me:What is the difference between men and boys? Her answer was: The price of their toys. She also knew the expresssion: The larger the tyres of a man s car, the smaller his balls. Quite a girl she was.
Are You Man Enough? is a question most of us get asked, somewhat regularly, during the major part of our lives. A man's masculinity can be questioned anywhere, by almost anyone, for almost anything: backing down from a fight, joining a Tai Chi class, not driving a 4X4, adopting an unpopular opinion, expressing feelings, not liking dirty jokes, not eating meat, not driving a noisy Harley Davidson motor cycle, not smoking or ordering a non alcoholic drink.
Research tells us this kind of pressure starts during elementary school, continues into a man's adult life and it never entirely goes away. Remember actor Jack Palance proving that he was still manly by doing one armed push ups when he received an Oscar at age 73?
We might ask WHY the pressure is always on? but that seems obvious. It is about proving that I am one of the guys. As human beings we need to feel like we belong to a group. Proving that we fit in and that we are masculine enough to hang out with the guys. And the (false) masculine image of "the guys" is being pushed down our throats by the media.
Let me ask you: Can you give me a few examples of real men?
I will answer the question for myself. Examples of real men are for me: Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
Research tells us that most men think they are not as masculine as other men they know, and most men do not think they are as masculine as they ought to be.
A long time ago it came as a surprise to me when my girlfriend and future wife said she felt attracted to me because I was such a masculine man. Strangely enough at the same time I was thinking I was NOT masculine enough. In order to suppress that feeling of not being masculine enough I felt compelled to do very "masculine" things like, driving big and expensive cars, run a marathon, climb mountains, practice rock climbing, ride extra long trips on a bicycle, descend wild water rivers in a kayak, never cry or show my true feelings.
Since my initiation in the ManKindProject I have learned to embrace the real sacred masculinity of my true self. It is not about pretending something or imitating an artificial image put forward by the media. It is certainly not about driving a 4X4 car to the office or to the supermarket. It is about being a warrior of the heart willing to work with everything I kept hidden, everything I negated and repressed for the major part of my life. It is about accountability and integrity. It is about clear action in the community in order to change the world, one man at the time. Which man? Myself.
Aproaching the age of seventy I look back and feel blessed with my journey of personal development.
A while ago I met my friend Hilda and her new partner Charles. A few years ago I got to know Hilda at the start of a Tai Chi course and since then we both enjoy attending the classes.
Shaking hands with Charles I asked him when he would be joining us for Tai Chi classes.
He averted his eyes, smiled awkwardly and answered: "I do not have any tights".
Having exchanged some small-talk I walked on, thinking about what Charles had said.
In his eyes and body language I had noticed the fear of a shy man.
For him practicing Tai Chi is something for sissies and the last thing he wants, is to look like a sissy. He wants to be considered a real man. Obviously he did not know that Tai Chi is a form of disguised martial arts. Later I saw Charles driving what could be called a "special" red car with a fancy steering wheel, lots of stickers, a noisy exhaust pipe, white stripes running over the red body and large tyres.
It reminded me of the question a former girlfriend once asked me:What is the difference between men and boys? Her answer was: The price of their toys. She also knew the expresssion: The larger the tyres of a man s car, the smaller his balls. Quite a girl she was.
Are You Man Enough? is a question most of us get asked, somewhat regularly, during the major part of our lives. A man's masculinity can be questioned anywhere, by almost anyone, for almost anything: backing down from a fight, joining a Tai Chi class, not driving a 4X4, adopting an unpopular opinion, expressing feelings, not liking dirty jokes, not eating meat, not driving a noisy Harley Davidson motor cycle, not smoking or ordering a non alcoholic drink.
Research tells us this kind of pressure starts during elementary school, continues into a man's adult life and it never entirely goes away. Remember actor Jack Palance proving that he was still manly by doing one armed push ups when he received an Oscar at age 73?
We might ask WHY the pressure is always on? but that seems obvious. It is about proving that I am one of the guys. As human beings we need to feel like we belong to a group. Proving that we fit in and that we are masculine enough to hang out with the guys. And the (false) masculine image of "the guys" is being pushed down our throats by the media.
Let me ask you: Can you give me a few examples of real men?
I will answer the question for myself. Examples of real men are for me: Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
Research tells us that most men think they are not as masculine as other men they know, and most men do not think they are as masculine as they ought to be.
A long time ago it came as a surprise to me when my girlfriend and future wife said she felt attracted to me because I was such a masculine man. Strangely enough at the same time I was thinking I was NOT masculine enough. In order to suppress that feeling of not being masculine enough I felt compelled to do very "masculine" things like, driving big and expensive cars, run a marathon, climb mountains, practice rock climbing, ride extra long trips on a bicycle, descend wild water rivers in a kayak, never cry or show my true feelings.
Since my initiation in the ManKindProject I have learned to embrace the real sacred masculinity of my true self. It is not about pretending something or imitating an artificial image put forward by the media. It is certainly not about driving a 4X4 car to the office or to the supermarket. It is about being a warrior of the heart willing to work with everything I kept hidden, everything I negated and repressed for the major part of my life. It is about accountability and integrity. It is about clear action in the community in order to change the world, one man at the time. Which man? Myself.
Friday, January 21, 2011
The Elders Story
As a member of the UK council of elders I received a beautiful message about
The Elders Story. With my date of birth in 1943 I am en elder myself. I love being an elder. I do not want to pretend that I am still "young". What you are about to read is inspiring me.
Bruno
The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.
The Elders story
The story of the Elders started in a conversation between the entrepreneur Richard Branson and the musician Peter Gabriel. The idea they discussed was a simple one. In an increasingly interdependent world – a global village – could a small, dedicated group of independent elders help to resolve global problems and ease human suffering?
For inspiration, they looked to traditional societies, where elders often help to share wisdom and resolve disputes within communities. They took their idea to Nelson Mandela, who agreed to support it. With the help of Graça Machel and Desmond Tutu, Mandela set about bringing the Elders together.
Prospective members were invited to join on the basis of a distinct set of criteria. Firstly, and most importantly, they should be independent. They should have earned international trust, demonstrated integrity and built a reputation for inclusive, progressive leadership.
Mandela announced the formation of the Elders in July 2007, on the occasion of his 89th birthday, at a ceremony in Johannesburg. During the ceremony, he described the mission of the group:
"The Elders can speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and behind the scenes. They will reach out to those who most need their help. They will support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict and inspire hope where there is despair." Nelson Mandela.
How do they work?
The Elders amplify the voices of those who work hard to be heard, challenge injustice, stimulate dialogue and debate and help others to work for positive change in their societies.
The Elders do not hold public office and have no political or legislative power. Because they are not bound by the interests of any single nation, government or institution, they are free to speak boldly and with whomever they choose on any issue, and to take any action that they believe is right.
When undertaking initiatives, the Elders are committed to listening to the views of all groups and individuals – and especially women and young people. The Elders work both publicly and behind the scenes and at all levels - local, national and international - lending support and advice when invited, and sometimes when it is not.
Read more at http://www.theelders.org/initiatives
The Elders Story. With my date of birth in 1943 I am en elder myself. I love being an elder. I do not want to pretend that I am still "young". What you are about to read is inspiring me.
Bruno
The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.
The Elders story
The story of the Elders started in a conversation between the entrepreneur Richard Branson and the musician Peter Gabriel. The idea they discussed was a simple one. In an increasingly interdependent world – a global village – could a small, dedicated group of independent elders help to resolve global problems and ease human suffering?
For inspiration, they looked to traditional societies, where elders often help to share wisdom and resolve disputes within communities. They took their idea to Nelson Mandela, who agreed to support it. With the help of Graça Machel and Desmond Tutu, Mandela set about bringing the Elders together.
Prospective members were invited to join on the basis of a distinct set of criteria. Firstly, and most importantly, they should be independent. They should have earned international trust, demonstrated integrity and built a reputation for inclusive, progressive leadership.
Mandela announced the formation of the Elders in July 2007, on the occasion of his 89th birthday, at a ceremony in Johannesburg. During the ceremony, he described the mission of the group:
"The Elders can speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and behind the scenes. They will reach out to those who most need their help. They will support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict and inspire hope where there is despair." Nelson Mandela.
How do they work?
The Elders amplify the voices of those who work hard to be heard, challenge injustice, stimulate dialogue and debate and help others to work for positive change in their societies.
The Elders do not hold public office and have no political or legislative power. Because they are not bound by the interests of any single nation, government or institution, they are free to speak boldly and with whomever they choose on any issue, and to take any action that they believe is right.
When undertaking initiatives, the Elders are committed to listening to the views of all groups and individuals – and especially women and young people. The Elders work both publicly and behind the scenes and at all levels - local, national and international - lending support and advice when invited, and sometimes when it is not.
Read more at http://www.theelders.org/initiatives
Monday, January 10, 2011
Imagine a circle of men
Imagine a circle of men where every one listens, not only to what you say, but also to what is behind what you say.
Every one is in tune with your voice, your emotion, your energy and every one is intent on receiving everything you communicate.
A circle of men where every one listens to hear the very best in you, even when you cannot hear it in yourself.
Imagine a circle of men which will remind hold you of your commitments, so you can hold yourself accountable and keep moving forward toward your dreams and goals.
A circle who reminds you of your commitments and holds you accountable without judgment when you miss the mark.
Imagine a circle of men which is totally curious about your dreams and aspirations, about what it is that makes you tick, what you value, what you are most passionate about in life. A circle that will help clarify your goals and provide tools for action and learning that lead you to the life you want.
Imagine an experience where you finally break free of those limiting beliefs that sabotage you, where those beliefs are noticed for what they really are and where the powerful part of you is called forth with a new set of beliefs.
Imagine a circle where you can experience and develop a new leader within yourself. A circle where it is safe to be who you really want to be.
If this calls to you, get in touch with Bruno on brunosdogs@gmail.com or call
00 34 690.19 19 76
With thanks to MKP.sa.
(extracted from Co-active coaching by Withworth, Kimsey House, Sandahl)
Every one is in tune with your voice, your emotion, your energy and every one is intent on receiving everything you communicate.
A circle of men where every one listens to hear the very best in you, even when you cannot hear it in yourself.
Imagine a circle of men which will remind hold you of your commitments, so you can hold yourself accountable and keep moving forward toward your dreams and goals.
A circle who reminds you of your commitments and holds you accountable without judgment when you miss the mark.
Imagine a circle of men which is totally curious about your dreams and aspirations, about what it is that makes you tick, what you value, what you are most passionate about in life. A circle that will help clarify your goals and provide tools for action and learning that lead you to the life you want.
Imagine an experience where you finally break free of those limiting beliefs that sabotage you, where those beliefs are noticed for what they really are and where the powerful part of you is called forth with a new set of beliefs.
Imagine a circle where you can experience and develop a new leader within yourself. A circle where it is safe to be who you really want to be.
If this calls to you, get in touch with Bruno on brunosdogs@gmail.com or call
00 34 690.19 19 76
With thanks to MKP.sa.
(extracted from Co-active coaching by Withworth, Kimsey House, Sandahl)
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