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Turning Inside out
This story is about yet another event that occurred on my trip to Teotihuacán (“Teo”) with don Miguel Ruiz and his apprentices. In this instance I was working as part of a “men’s group” on the grounds of the hotel. This was a group of thirty or so men, with five or six male leaders helping us to move our assemblage points. We did a number of strangely impactful activities, such as be “born” from a nagual woman, and other exercises.
The event that made the biggest impression on me was associated with recapitulating a parent. I picked on my father as the focus of my attention for the activity. I went as far back as I could go in my memories of him and found that he was a frightening and not very loving figure in my early youth. I recalled the times that he would beat me with a belt: including the last time, when I finally refused to react and he just put his belt back on with the comment that he guessed that approach of discipline would no longer work. He didn’t physically beat me very often, but when he did it certainly made a huge impression. What he mainly did was give me “tongue lashings” that consisted of lengthy, heated, highly insulting lectures. I suppose he must have started that approach after he found that the belt no longer worked. During these lectures I would wish that he would just go back to the belt and get it over; especially when he would force one of my friends to attend one of his tongue lashings. It was bad enough for me to endure the humiliation, but it was almost intolerable for him to do it in public, and lash out at my friends in the same way.
My clearest memories of him beyond that were often things like his loud and outrageous arguments with my mother. He would accuse her of things that she had clearly not done, and then refuse to listen to her side of the story. Instead, he would continue to hammer at her for imagined actions or words. It was so frustrating that it made me want to shout or run away.
However, as I sat there thinking about him I found that I had many good memories too. I have fond memories of times we went boating, camped in the mountains, explored ghost towns and abandoned gold mines, and many other things. It was really a mixed bag of good and bad, but for the purposes of the exercise for the day I focused on the negative aspects of our relationship. I did this partly in an attempt to better understand my brother’s relationship with Pa; which was a difficult one based on my brother’s negative experiences as a child. I could not fully understand the difficulties. Maybe I happened along after the bulk of the negative feelings had dwindled and we did more family things together, so it wasn’t as bad for me. I think my brother missed out on most of our fun outings because they started happening after he was too old to attend. He is six years older than I am, and we probably starting taking more outings when I was nine or so.
I had been sitting on the ground with my eyes closed, recalling my memories of my father. It had gotten pretty emotionally charged, I was close to tears and becoming very angry at my father for treating me like he did, and for treating my brother like he did. I was angry about being beaten, I was angry at the tongue lashings, I was angry at being insulted in front of my friends, I was angry at his treatment of my mother, I was just plain hurt and angry at him.
As I sat there in my anger, all of a sudden I felt a change in myself. It was a very odd feeling of change, one that I have never experienced before or afterward. It was as if I had turned into a flexible, hollow cylinder – shaped into a circle like a donut. I then turned “inside out”; somehow thoughts and feelings that were inside of me, bent, turned, and flexed. I literally felt like I was turning inside out, being pulled or pushed through a small hole. I finally popped through that little hole and found myself whole again, but with a totally different point of view about my father. I now realized that he had done the very best that he could at all times. It wasn’t that he was trying to be mean, nasty, or anything like that – it was just that sometimes the best that he could do wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. My anger about him had nothing to do with him, it was entirely to do with me. I wanted him to act in a certain way, and when he didn’t (or couldn’t) I was angry with him for that. I then felt that all of my anger was gone. I no longer had any reason to judge him. All that I could do was appreciate what he did right and feel slightly sorry for him for the things that he didn’t do right.
Once I got past the trauma of going from anger and fear, to love and compassion, I opened my eyes. Ted (one of Miguel’s teachers) was sitting in front of me with his face about two inches in front of me. I opened my eyes to look directly into his eyes. This happened several times on the journey. It seems like whenever we were asked to close our eyes and do something, when I opened them there would be Ted’s eyes, inches away from me. Even when I didn’t think he was anywhere around it would happen. I talked to him about it and he didn’t seem to realize that it was happening, but I noticed because it was such a shocking and repeated thing during that week. It was nice because he has a way of looking right into my soul, but it was always a surprise. I felt that he was guiding me deeper and deeper into myself during that week.
From that moment on I have found that I have much more patience with people. I now believe that people almost always do the best that they can at the moment, given what they have to work with. There is no reason to get angry, or feel insulted or anything like that. They are doing their best, sometimes it is less than either they or I would like, but it is still the best that they can accomplish. This strange turning inside out was one of those changing points in my life. It felt like a physical event, not just an imagining of a shift of point of view. I not only turned inside out with respect to my feelings about my father, but it has changed my worldview.
Mask Effectiveness
The March 13, 2021 issue of Science News has an interesting article concerning the effectiveness of masks at preventing exposures to air borne microbes (including the covid-19 virus). One set of numbers when using medical masks was particularly enlightening to me. They performed a number of tests with two manikins (surrogates for people) spaced six feet apart. If the receiver alone wears a mask, it reduces the amount of inhaled droplets by 7.5%. If the source alone wears a mask, it reduces the receivers exposure by 41.3%. If both wear a mask, the reduction is 84.3%. Clearly, the most important player to reducing exposure is the source person (as we are being constantly told), but the real benefits come when both people wear masks.
If the masks are worn “properly” (knotting the ear loops close to the mask and tucking in the ends to eliminate side gaps), the single mask worn by the receiver reduced expose by 64.5% compared to when neither wears a mask. If both do this, then the reduction is 95.9%. Wearing double masks helps even more. When just the receiver wore a double mask, the protection increased to 83%. When both wore double masks, the protection increased to 96.4%.
While these numbers are interesting, and impressive, they still leave me scratching my head because I don’t know how to align the reductions in particles to reduction in risk. Obviously, if neither parties are infected the masks don’t do anything about reducing risks in that specific event. No infection means no risk, and it is as low as it can go. But what if the source is actually infected? What happens to the risk in that case? For example, if it takes 300 particles to cause infection (an ‘official’ estimate), and the source spews out 100,000 particles a minute (5 million in a sneeze), does reducing the exposure by 96.4% really help much? 300 particles is 0.3% of the initial 100,000 particles per minute. That means that the receiver still receives over 10 times as many particles as required to become infected each minute. Once again, it appears that the reduction in risk of infection is close to zero.
It sounds like wearing a mask is not necessarily “protective”, the only real protection is to avoid being in the vicinity of infected people. There are reports of what sound like valid investigations that found little evidence that mask wearing is particularly effective. Perhaps masks and distancing are helpful for necessary short term excursions into potentially infected areas (such as grocery stores and the like), but the real answer is to avoid infected people. I, for one, am willing to believe that masks worn by a source can prevent large globs of stuff from flying out of their mouth into my face, and that has GOT to be an improvement. I therefore do as we were told a year ago, I wear my mask to help protect others and sure wish they would do the same to help protect me.
By the way, while researching this piece I came upon a discussion about the back of the nose being the ideal “incubator” for the virus. Breathing viruses in through the mouth isn’t nearly as dangerous as breathing them into through the nose. Hence, all of those “nose breathers” that don’t put the mask over their noses are doing very little good for themselves. Perhaps it cuts down on the number of droplets being expelled when they talk or sneeze. I also found that the best science still points to vaccinated people being just as susceptible to infection, and just as contagious, as they were before being vaccinated. The only real difference is that they are protected from serious illness, and the creation of many more non-systematic people who think they are now “safe”. They may be safe in some sense, but those around them are not. Testing can help show that a person wasn’t infected when the took the test, but says nothing about what happened subsequently. Actually, since there is a delay of up to three days before tests show a positive response, the tests really only show that the person wasn’t infected three days before taking the test. A friend of mine that recently went to New Zealand said that prior to the flight all passengers tested negative, but by the time the landed in New Zealand, 6 tested positive. Those six were infected sometime between three days prior to their test and when they boarded the airplane. All were asymptomatic when they landed.
Summer Walk and Sit
Bill Fell 8/16-17/20
According to Ani Pema Chodron, Anam Thubten gave a teaching that if you paused 108 times per day for six months, you’d be enlightened.
1.
Out the front door, barely break of day Sudden unforeseen hit of heat Down the driveway, turn left Me and my tall shadow head west Down to the greenbelt, head-fake right, go left A soft glow coats the redwoods, ginkoes Fronting an oddly opaque blackdrop Blanket of clouds no doubt? Why do I not pause?
2.
Borrowing a corner of Chestnut Park We, a small-group of meditators take our seats, Removing masks . . . quietly gongggging . . . breathing; Hawk-less, squirrel-less, subdued spaciousness Scrub jays own the air A sudden flash barely beside my left eye Is that? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes! Enmeshed in perfect rolling thunder A southwest flash, but . . . . Is that where the sounds started? If it happens again, I need a count Filling-up this now with ever-more storylines Sympathetic nervous system invoked Why do I not pause?
3.
Now, THAT CERTAINLY was a raindrop. Up front, Amanda flashes a friendly face Refreshing drips soak through, a cooling relief But where might all THIS be headed? When do we take cover under a yoga mat? Who’s the first to make a move? Just sit tight Fill-up this new now with commentary Why do I not pause ?
March 2021 TBD
I have been noticing a definite “up tic” in the number of industry groups that are talking about the benefits of system safety. Many of them don’t know that they are “inventing” an approach that has been successfully used for almost 100 years on millions of projects with a combined value of tens of trillions of dollars. It seems that many of these groups believe they came up with the “new” idea that designing safety into projects is better, less expensive and results in fewer false starts than traditional safety approaches – not to mention that it is also more effective in reducing accident loses.
System safety is an engineering process that starts as early as practical and continues throughout the project’s life until there is no longer value in continuing. Conceptually system safety consists of three simple steps: (1) Identify potential hazards, (2) Control the risks associated with those identified hazards to acceptable levels, and (3) Repeat. Over the past ninety or so years, the system safety profession has developed many tools and techniques to assist with that process. It isn’t something that needs to be “invented”, it is something that can be learned. I am happy that people believe they invented an important new approach because that might finally result in them “buying in” to the concepts and the processes that have been shown to be highly effective in reducing accident rates and associated costs.
There are a few places where a conversation with system safety engineers could help industries new to the ideas from going down some unproductive, and disappointing, paths. System safety engineering has been in the business long enough that it has a lot of history and experience experimenting with ideas that just don’t work out. One of the really big ideas that keeps coming up is that “risk assessments” can be used to determine what is “safe enough” under the misunderstanding that “risk” (safety risk) is quantifiable. It seems like it should be quantifiable since it is expressed in terms of “probability” (a number) and “severity” (severity is not a number unless it is translated into a numerical value such as dollars). “Severity” clearly does not mean dollars lost; it means something else such more closely aligned with pain and suffering than economic cost. For example, how much is lost finger worth? For the person paying for a lost finger it is commonly valued at around $2000. I wonder what it is “worth” to the loser of the finger in terms of immediate pain and suffering plus the lost capability for the rest of their life. While converting this kind of severity to dollars makes it easy to settle an insurance claim, I don’t believe it accurately reflects the meaning of “severity.”
The reality is that neither probability nor severity can be accurately determined in the messy and very cloudy “crystal ball” used to predict the future event(s) associated with any design decision. For one thing, there is almost always of range of outcomes, each of which has a different probability of occurrence, even if they appear to be identical. For another thing, assigning a dollar value to an outcome is arbitrary at best, capricious at worse. Knowing how to properly add up the potential outcome multiplied by the probability combinations is fraught with difficulties that take more effort and research than is normally available. Assuming that it is possible to make this determination, the costs of accurately predicting the “risk” associated with any decision or design feature is so high that it is only attempted in cases of extreme risk, and then only to the point that everyone agrees that it is “good enough” to be used to guide a decision.
The idea that risk is somehow quantifiable, and can therefore used as the sole (or major) element in making safety decisions has resulted in many questionable decisions. It certainly “feels” good to use a number as a surrogate for making a decision. After all, this approach eliminates the cloud of being responsible for making a “bad” decision. The risk acceptance criteria were made long before the actual situation was known, therefore they are somehow judged to be “dispassionate” and therefore “correct.” However, once an undesired outcome occurs the problem of whether or not the correct criteria were used comes home to roost.
Some common examples come to mind. One thing that has always amazed me is the prevalence of railroad grade crossings in the United States. These are those places where vehicles drive across railroad tracks with the only “protection” being either a sign, a sign plus a pair of flashing lights, or perhaps those signals plus the addition of a couple of thin wooden arms that block the traffic lane – but with sufficient space to easily drive around the arms to get across the railroad track even though the lights are flashing, and the arms are down. That situation results in about 2000 collisions per year resulting in about 200 deaths in the United States. There are also a number of spectacular collisions each year where a car started to cross with an “all clear” signal, but failed to complete the crossing before a train crashed into them. This of course could be prevented by eliminating all such crossings, thus eliminating the event of a highway vehicle being on a railroad track. It would be expensive, but Europe has managed to do that – they don’t allow railroad crossings. It is all about the “value” of the risks involved. Railroads aren’t liable for the cost of accidents like these unless a signal has malfunctioned – therefore they put all of their efforts and money into making sure the signals don’t fail. As long as the driver has been “warned,” the responsibilities of actions to avoid the hazard are judged to rest with the driver. In addition, my guess is that the “irresponsible” driver is also liable for costs that their “error” caused to the railroad.
Is the cost of solving the problem worth the costs of the lives and injuries? In the United States, the decision has been that the cost of the negative outcomes is “acceptable.” I am not sure who it is acceptable to, but clearly those that are in a position to make that decision have done so. The same answer was not reached in many other countries around the world. Those countries have decided that the risks are not acceptable and it is the responsibility of the rail owners and the municipalities to pay for the protection as part of the costs of running their business, instead of injured parties paying in terms of their deaths and injuries (and destroyed vehicles). The decision is about “risk” but it is not just about a number, it is more about a philosophy or point of view. We have made a decision that it is not “feasible” to eliminate the risks of death at railroad crossings (the first priority in the hierarchy of system safety control); it is only feasible to implement the lesser levels of the hierarchy, placing the onus on the driving public to be “careful.”
Another example that I find interesting has to do with the risk of falling when working on roofs. In the United States about 150 deaths per year are caused by construction workers falling from roofs. OSHA considers this to be within the top 10 “avoidable” causes of death in the construction industry. I don’t have the statistics, but my guess is that perhaps ten times as many of the falls result in serious injury, but not death. On a population basis we know that there are about 150 deaths per year. We also know that each death costs the insurance companies about $150,000. So, the cost of “risks” to the industry might be expressed as $22,500,000 per year. The AGC (Associated General Contractors of America) has 27,000 members, representing a portion of the licensed contractors. My guess is that there are perhaps 50,000 contractors that do at least some of their activities on roofs where workers are potentially exposed to fall hazards. That means that the average contractor’s exposure to roof fall hazards is perhaps $450 per year (“shared” among them as part of the cost of insurance). If labor costs $50/hour, that is about 9 hours per year per contractor. If they spend more than $450 (including lost productivity) enforcing fall protection provisions it is costing them more than it is saving. The correct action to control their financial risk is to do nothing.
The risks in terms of cost and severity are biased in favor of not providing protection. OSHA recognizes this problem; therefore they institute a system of fines for gross violations of the standards. Thus the “risks” to the contractor are the risks of getting caught not following the regulations, rather than the actual risks associated with falling. This turns the “risk acceptance” criteria once again into a social issue rather than a safety issue. We have taken the position that it is acceptable to kill 200 people a year in railroad crossing accidents, but not acceptable to kill 150 people a year from falling off of roofs. I am not making a judgment here, I am just pointing out that risk acceptance decisions are not as simple as just knowing the risk in terms of probability and severity.
It occurs to me that perhaps it is not feasible (and maybe not even possible) to design out the fall hazard when working on sloped roofs. OSHA has a number of requirements (laws) concerning the use of various types of fall protection devices, mostly depending upon various systems of belts, harnesses, lanyards and ropes. The problem with these are many fold, not the least of which is that it is extremely difficult (and dangerous) to do the necessary work while wearing these protective devices. It is difficult and expensive to provide adequate attachment points (particularly for existing roofs), the ropes get in the way and create a lot of “working around” problems that put people in harm’s way, they make it hard and slow to maneuver, and do a poor job of protecting people from falling. All of these problems, plus more, result in extremely low compliance to the regulations. I often stop to watch how this is being implemented and find that either no fall protection provisions are provided – or, the rope lanyards are clipped directly back to the worker’s belt so that they are just an extra thing to carry around. They are often not connected to anything.
I have little hope in any system of fall protection devices or equipment being capable of providing anything near “continuous” fall protection on sloped roofs. I think the only real solution is to avoid walking on sloped roofs. There are a number of possible solutions to accomplish such as solution. One solution might be to provide a mechanical device (crane type equipment) that provides a protected, level surface to work from. This sounds good until you realize that the surface being accessed would have to be lower than the working surface, making it very difficult and inefficient to do work. Maybe some sort of robot could be developed to do the work in place of people. With all of the advances in drones, autonomous machines maybe something useful, and affordable, will be developed – but this seems unlikely to me.
Perhaps the only “good” solution is to avoid building sloped roofs. Sloped roofs are only used because they are the accepted “style” in the United States. There are many countries, and many places in the American South West, where the accepted style is a flat roof, usually with a parapet around the edges. People use these rooftop spaces for many purposes besides keeping rain out of the house. They have gardens and entertain on their roofs. There is much value in terms of adding useable space, while virtually eliminating the risk of falling from the roof. At one time sloped roofs made sense because available roofing materials were inherently “leaky” in the horizontal position, their function depended upon “shingling” the materials to let water run-off. That is no longer a necessity, there are many cost effective solutions for constructing flat roofs.
Once again, the risk acceptance criterion is more of a social issue than a technical one. Is it “worth” changing to flat roofs? Who knows, it would save a few hundred deaths a year – but those that are saved are normally unknown strangers. The decision is an esthetic one associated the look of a flat roof versus a sloped one; it is not about costs, risks, reduction in deaths or anything else. It is all about what the building looks like.
The point of this is act as a “warning” to those that are new to the field of system safety (reducing risks to an acceptable level through design) that “risk” assessment and risk “acceptance” are not easily defined processes, and they do NOT remove people from the onus of having to make risk acceptance decisions. The values that are created in the risk assessment process are useful to provide some information about the level of risk involved, but that information is far too sketchy and poorly understood to be usable as the risk acceptance criteria. At best it is a means to communicate an engineering judgment to the risk acceptors, at worse it is an unsupported guess. It is just another piece of information, that used in conjunction with many other pieces of information, can provide assistance to the “risk acceptors” as to whether or not they can move forward with the design decisions. System safety is a very powerful tool, but it does not answer the difficult question of “is it safe enough?”
Recapitulation – first time
I first heard about the practice of recapitulation in Carlos Castaneda’s book s describing his encounters with a Mexican shaman. In several of those books he briefly talks about the importance of using a practice of going back and re-experiencing life events as an important way to get access to our personal energy. However, while he mentions it and alludes to its power, he doesn’t give enough details to be able to do it. Luckily, a couple of his fellow apprentices also wrote books about don Juan and the path of the warrior. They are much more specific about the importance of this practice, and give descriptions that are clear enough to actually do the practice. When I met my Toltec leader/guide/teacher/mentor Ramin, he stressed the importance of this practice, and suggested a book by Victor Sanchez, The Teachings of don Carlos, that provides additional details about how to do this practice. Ramin highly recommended it as a necessary step toward getting access to our personal power.
Sometime around 1996 it became clear that if I were serious about learning the Toltec path to wisdom I would have to do the practice of recapitulating my life. Therefore, I dedicated a year to it. My original agreement with myself when I started taking classes from Ramin was to do whatever he suggested for a year to see if it was worthwhile. I completed this year and found it to be exactly what I was hoping for. An additional year dedicated to taking the next step seemed reasonable to me.
The idea behind the practice of recapitulation is to re-experience (recapitulate) all of the important experiences in our lives in such a way as to be able to release the energy that we have invested in them. The point is that all of our personal energy is bound up in these past experiences, and that through the practice of recapitulation it is possible to free up that energy for our use. The Toltecs claim that we have a limited amount of total personal energy. Therefore, the goal is not to make new energy, but merely to gain better access to the energy that we already have. Our energy is almost always bound up with people that we have known, with the binding connections going both ways. Sometimes we are holding them with our energy, and sometimes they are holding us with theirs. In either case, we do not have access to all of our personal energy, and we are therefore not free. My goal is to be free.
The idea behind this process is pretty bizarre. It involves something that I can talk about and know a little about, but mostly it is inconceivable. Carlos talks about our “egg” of energy. He says that people consist of a large egg-shaped ball of energy fibers surrounding our body. These fibers are our connection to the universe and allow us to perceive the world around us. We interact using these fibers. Where the fibers come together they form what he calls the “assemblage point.” This point is located at about an arm’s length behind our right shoulder. The exact location of the assemblage point on this ball of luminous fibers determines how we perceive the world. Move it and our view of the world changes – Castaneda says the world actually changes; it is more than just our view of it. These fibers get “hooked” with other people’s fibers during our life, which means that we lose our ability to use those hooked fibers for other purposes. Recapitulation is a method for unhooking the bound up fibers as well as getting our egg back into shape, patching any holes and smoothing out any snarls that might have occurred during the tossing and tumbling of life.
The first step in the process of recapitulation is to identify the important people and events in your life. This would be a lot easier for a younger person. For a fifty-year-old like me, it included a long list of a LOT of important events. Partly based upon directions from Ramin, but mostly from directions from the books of Carlos and his cohorts, I made a chronological list of all of the people that I could recall in my life. I did this by breaking my life into phases (houses where I lived, jobs that I had, etc.) and then working my way through the memories of these phases. This part of the process took me about three months working on it an hour or two every day. Actually, it was most of my waking hours; the hour or two per day was spent documenting what I had been thinking about the rest of the time. At first I tried to sort out the important people from the unimportant ones, but I finally settled on the idea that if I could remember them, they were important for some reason. The ones that I couldn’t remember might not be so important. I tried to identify them by name, but in some instances I couldn’t recall names, so instead I made short descriptions to remind me of them. The names weren’t important, but the memory of them and our experiences together were. This list ended up including about 3,000 people. I created the list using a computer so I could sort them and print the list for future use.
The experience of doing this first step was amazing! It connected my life into a single, whole, experience rather than a long series of experiences. Before making this list I had tended to forget, or not pay attention to, past experiences and was just moving along in the “bubble” of the present. Paying attention to the present is not necessarily a bad thing, a focus on the present is what I am trying to achieve. However, the experience of remembering all of my life somehow broke the bounds of the present and made me realize that the past and the present are all here in the moment, we do not really leave the past behind. It is hard to explain, but I ended up feeling like the past, present and future were illusions – the reality is that it is all one. Just this part of the process turned out to be an amazing experience.
Then came the recapitulation. I made a wooden box to sit in while recapitulating. The box was just big enough so that I could sit cross-legged within it without touching the walls or top. It was tied together with cotton string; I used no metal in its construction. It was made from 1×6 boards, leaving cracks between the boards for ventilation. The front came off to make a door and there were no windows or other openings. The box ended up being rather wobbly in all directions, but was enough to give me a space of my own. I put the box in a shed out in my backyard, within a grove of eucalyptus trees, to protect it from the elements. Every day for about a year I would take my list of names, and sit in the box going person by person down the list until I had revisited everyone on the list.
I had a candle in the box with me so I had enough light to read the list. After reading the next name on the list, I would tear off the name and recapitulate them. In reality, I wasn’t exactly recapitulating them, I was recapitulating the events associated with them – but these two are so closely connected that I gave up trying to figure out the distinction. When I finished with a person, I burned their name and add the remains to a can of ashes.
I soon realized that there was a problem with dealing with the events associated with a person because people that I know well for a long time have hundreds or thousands of events associated with them – many of the events were very important indeed. I started to wonder if I should recapitulate each event or each person. I had to decide how to deal with this. Going back to don Juan’s instructions, it seemed like the idea was that we make connections to people in our lives. These connections are more or less permanent, continuing to influence our lives long after they were created. In the process of recapitulation, we are trying to disconnect these inter-personnel connections. Therefore, it is only necessary to go back to the last time that we encountered them – at that time all of the connections would exist and be available to us. I followed his guidance and concentrated on the last encounter that I could recall with each person.
After a few weeks of working my way down the list of people, I decided that the process is a purely magical one, meaning that it has little or no meaning to my logical mind – it just works. I had to give up on making any sense out of it and do it with the assumption that something was happening. The process is pretty simple. It consisted of the following five steps: (1) I imagined the person and the event surrounding the last time that I could recall seeing them. (2) I then watched that event from the prospective of being outside of the event, kind of like watching a movie. (3) Then I “jumped” into the event, recalling what it was like, and how I felt, from the inside when it was happening. At this step I tried to remember it as clearly as possible, including sights, smells, sounds, temperature, etc. The more complete this reconstruction was the better. This step involved the realignment of the assemblage point with where it was at that previous time. The realignment brings the connections that existed at that moment back in a way that allows them to be changed again. (4) I then jumped back out to see the view as in a movie, but this time including the smells and other things, and then finally (5) I breathed to release the energy binding us together.
The breathing was done in a special way. I turned my head toward the right shoulder and breathed in through my nose while slowly turning my head toward the left shoulder, retrieving energy that I used to connect and hold the other person. After that was completed, I then breathed out while turning my head from left to right, releasing energy that the other was holding me with. I would focus on breathing in, then focus on breathing out. I breathed like this, imagining the energy being released from both directions, until it felt like there were no more connections. At that point I was finished with that person, and would light the paper with their name and burn it up, placing the ashes in a can along with the ashes of all of the other names.
Every once in a while I came across an event that contained a special jewel for me. These were times when I found the source of agreements that I had made about myself and who I am. It turns out that my self image, and my understanding of who I am, come from a long series of agreements that I have made with myself, usually based upon things that others have told me while I was growing up. The agreements include things like, “you are not handsome.” Oh, really? Ok, I agree with that, I am not handsome. “You are good at science.” Oh really? I agree, I am science oriented and good at it. “You are too stupid to do that.” Sorry, I can’t do that, I am too stupid. It goes on and on and on. I slowly built up the story of who I am, what I can do, what I cannot do, what I like, etc. based on all of these little agreements. This is not a bad thing; it is just the way it is. The problem is that I made the agreements without thinking about them, based upon assumptions of what was meant (which was usually wrong), and we made a whole set of conflicting and confusing agreements because I got input from many people and experiences all jumbled together. This helps to explain the mess that we are in when we try to untangle who we “really are.” We sometimes have a chance to revisit these agreements and change them.
While recapitulating, now and then I came across events and people that seemed to be at the root of some agreement that I had about myself. I then had the chance to re-visit that agreement and make a conscious decision about whether or not I wanted to keep it. I could decide right then and there to discard it. However, I couldn’t just throw it away; I had to replace it with something. At about this same time I had read don Miguel Ruiz’s little book The Four Agreements. It turned out that in almost all cases I could replace my unwanted agreement with one or more of the four agreements. I didn’t have to change from “I am stupid” to “I am smart.” All I had to do was change from “I am stupid” to “I will do the best that I can”. With this simple change I dropped the judgments and baggage that came with the initial agreement.
This process was hugely liberating! Day after day I found that I kept feeling more and more free. I stopped worrying about problems with others, stopped trying to hold others with my energy, stopped letting them hold on to me. I started being solid and strong by myself. At first I was afraid that this process would ruin my feelings of love for my wife, family and friends because I was confused about the difference of being attached and being in love. It is true, I lost my attachments – but that was a good thing. I could finally just feel my love and allow myself to enjoy them and our relationship, no attachments and no controlling the other is needed. Love and friendship are not based upon holding onto and controlling the other. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is involved in allowing the other to be free and enjoying them just as they are without trying to change or control that. Instead of making me become isolated from my friends and loved ones, it brought me much closer in a much warmer and comfortable way.
Not only did this process help me to get closer to others, it helped me to let go of damaging agreements that were not useful to me. It also allowed me to feel much more empowered to be able to use (or withhold) my energy to suit my needs. I no longer feel compelled to use up all of my energy on things that don’t matter. I feel like I am now much freer to be me, and much less compelled to be what I think others want me to be.
By the time I had spent a year sitting in my box, burned the last name from my list, and burned the box – I was floating in the clouds. I now feel peace and joy with life most of the time, even when it is not “fun” or peaceful. I stand up tall and look life straight on with fearlessness and excitement to see what is coming next. I find that I am much more relaxed and patient with my friends and loved ones because I just enjoy the time that I am having with them at the moment, there is nothing more important to do than what I am doing. I find that what people do and say has less impact on me. I can see clearly that what they say and do tells me a lot about them, but very little about me – so if they say something bad or something good, about me, it is not about me – it is about them. I don’t need to let them “hook” me, and I don’t have to try to “hook” them. When this happens, then I go back and unhook in a mini-recapitulation exercise. In order to avoid the extra work later on, I try to avoid the hooks in the first place. This doesn’t mean that I don’t let myself like or love them, or accept their good feelings; it just means that I don’t accept the controlling aspects of the relationship.
My year of sitting in my box was a true turning point in my life. I no longer am able to return to be the person that I was before I met Ramin and started on the path of the warrior. I am now on a path full of love, hope, joy, excitement and mystery. I will never be able to go back, nor would I want to.
Energy Use
I think this illustrated graph of U.S. Energy Consumption for 2019 is worth taking a close look at in order to gain a little understanding of how we use, and loss, energy. The “rejected” energy blocks represent efficiency loses that are not usable. One of the big ones is the 24.2 lost from electrical generation. About 1/3 of the power gets to the user, the rest is lost in generation and transmission. Unfortunately, this diagram includes “transmission loses” within generation loses. About 18 quads are transmission loses and about 6 occur during generation. Another interesting one is the transportation portion of petroleum use. When powered by internal combustion, about 80% is lost to heat, 20% to motion. Clearly there are a lot of opportunities to make major reductions in primary energy use through conservation and switching how and where power comes from.
The task before us with regard to CO2 production and global warming is daunting. We need to decrease the energy consumption on the right-hand side by a combination of improved efficiency and changing what we do. We also need to decrease the use of natural gas, coal and petroleum for energy production. There are issues beyond CO2 production that come into play and need to be considered. For example, beyond the problem of burning natural gas(NG) producing CO2, the drilling and shipping of NG releases vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Therefore, reducing the amount of NG used, also reduces the amount of another green house gas in the form of methane. Coal has a similar double or triple advantage in the form of less destruction of the environment (lakes, rivers, mountain tops, etc), but reduces the amount of many pollutants (including radioactive compounds) into the environment. Similarly, capturing methane at landfills to produce electricity also reduces the amount of methane released into the atmosphere.
However, some “improvements” such as increased use of biomass is very problematic if that entails wholesale destruction of vast stretches of forest lands while harvesting trees to be ground up for use as bio-fuels. Diverting methane from land fills is one thing, cutting down thousands of square miles of forest is entirely different. Not all solutions are created equal in terms of green house gas reduction and overall improvements to the environment (or at least, reduced degradation of the environment).
This is a very complex problem, one that has dollar signs associated with each of these paths. Part of the problem is that the dollars in terms of costs and benefits are not distributed evenly. It is almost a zero sum game, where each increase in one location is accompanied by a lose in another – and different people or organizations own and control the various paths.
Zooming, That Being the Message
Bill Fell 6/26/20 and 7/3/20
Teaching a class on Zoom is different as we eventually learn from trying things out. For example, you can invoke a weird sense of “NOW” by trying to get everyone (unmuted) to chant in unison.
Visiting daily a morning wall of sangha Boxes of images of thoughts; labels The occasional judgement, imputation Subtle . . . enabling eye shifts allow for Honing in on me, or whomever; We’ve permissions to pin, or not to stare? But then now, who’s looking at me? Is this, an OK-time to sneak a web search? Ahh yes, fresh multitasking possibilities Seemingly synchronous speech, volume set to “11” Just don’t try group chanting or knee slapping A cacophonous stream of non-split-second now Dicing up the world In new low-energy exchanges; It’s all part of the program
Where do we stand with the pandemic?
It appears that we are entering a pretty dangerous phase of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated and thinking that is the end of their problems. Others are seeing the numbers dropping and feel like we are at the end – and there is no longer any need to follow “the rules” or be vaccinated. In both cases even those of us who have been “being good” are tempted to go out and play after a year of being cooped up. We are all ready to see people, especially our friends and family. The CDC is fueling this idea by telling us that it is fine to have small, indoor, meetings with a small group of friends without masks or social distancing as long as everyone has been vaccinated.
However, at the same time we are being told that there are several new variants that are much more lethal and spread much easier. In addition, organizations such as UC Davis point out that they continue to require regular asymptomatic testing for access to their facilities. They say that this testing continues to be absolutely essential, even for vaccinated people, because we do not yet know everything about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing transmission or infection. It is known that the vaccines protect us from serious illness, but it is not known if they prevent us from spreading the coronavirus. UC Davis continues on to state that there is a risk that the virus may find harbor in our upper respiratory tract even after we are vaccinated. So, by getting tested regularly, we are protecting our families and friends as they wait to get vaccinated.
This is starting to sound a little like double-speak to me. We are being told that it is acceptable to meet in small indoor groups without masks or social distancing, but that it isn’t safe to do so. It might be safe for the people who are doing the gathering, but maybe not so safe for those that we then contact that aren’t yet vaccinated (assuming the vaccination works as well as they claim – which we are told unknown with the new variants).
I read this apparent double message to mean that they believe the serious infection rates are low enough to not overwhelm the hospitals. I DO NOT see anything anywhere saying that this behavior is “safe” – especially for those who are still at risk that might encounter those that have been gathering. They are saying it won’t overwhelm the medical system – period. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear that giving vaccinations without continuing all of the protective measures has the potential for creating a very large cohort of non-symptomatic infectious people capable of stealthily spreading the virus to those who are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated including those that are not yet in the approved list, those that have pre-existing conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated, and children under the age of 18 (maybe it is now 16).
My personal thoughts on this are that I am not venturing out yet. I am waiting to hear that vaccination prevents infection and spreading of the virus. My guess is that we won’t hear that because it doesn’t do that, but testing should provide the necessary data soon. If the vaccinations do not prevent infection and spreading, then there is a problem until such time as all of the people that I might encounter are no longer at risk of getting it. I don’t trust the groups of people that I might socialize with to avoid contact with anyone that might be infected – in fact, I am absolutely positive that they haven’t done that and won’t do it now.
I wonder if those that refuse to be vaccinated or follow stringent safety measures would be willing to refuse admission to a hospital should they become infected? It seems only fair that they accept the natural consequences of their behavior. Silly me – of course they would want to be treated, they just don’t want to be bothered with the other parts. Oh well, that seems to be a part of being “human”.