How the Anti-vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
Paul Offit, MDIn his new book Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All pediatrican Dr Paul A. Offit traces the history of the anti-vaccine movement from opposition to the small pox vaccine in the 19th century up through recent events. Unfortunately, the results are predictable. Reducing vaccination rates lead to reemergence of dangerous preventable infectious diseases. That is why the decision not to vaccinate is not a personal decision. It is one that involves the whole community.
This is the focus of the conversation I had with Dr. Offit in Episode 40 of Books and Ideas. This is a follow-up to Dr. Offit's first interview here in Episode 25.
Because I think this issue is literally a matter of life and death, I encourage you to share this podcast with others.
Listen to Dr. Offit's interview (Books and Ideas #40)
Episode Transcript (Download PDF)
Subscribe to Books and Ideas Podcast:
Links and References
- Paul Offit, MD: Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
- Vaccines and Your Child: Separating Fact from Fiction by Paul A. Offit MD, Charlotte A. Moser
- Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit M.D.
- Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Paul A. Offit
- Books and Ideas Episode 25: In this 2008 interview we talked about Offit's book Autism's False Prophets and our shared fears about the consequences of falling vaccination rates.
- van den Hof S, Conyn-van Spaendonck MA, van Steenbergen JE. Measles epidemic in the Netherlands, 1999-2000. J Infect Dis. 2002 Nov 15;186(10):1483-6. Epub 2002 Oct 29. During a measles outbreak that occurred in the Netherlands between 1990 and 2000 researchers found that fully vaccinated children living in communities with low rates of vaccination were at greater risk than unvaccinated children living in highly vaccinated communities.
- Brian Deer on Andrew Wakefield's conflicts of interest: "MMR:The Truth Behind the Crisis," Sunday Times (London), February 24, 2004.
- I mentioned two important court decisions made in 2009 and 2010 by the Omnibus Autism Proceedings. In 2009 the court ruled that there is no evidence that thimrosal-containing vaccines cause autism and in 2010 it ruled that there is no evidence that thimirosal alone causes autism. The complete docket of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings are available at http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2718.
- All of Dr. Offits books (listed above) contain extensive references for those wishing to do more research.
- Jenny McCarthy Body Count: there were at least 662 deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases between June 3, 2007 and February 19, 2011.
Announcements
- Please feel free to share this podcast with others. Please contact me if you would like to use the interview-only in another podcast or for patient education.
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Dr. Ginger Campbell - How the Anti-vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Dr. Rick Hanson - Stephen Colbert: We Don't Need To 'Keep Fear Alive'
Rick Hanson takes the topic of Stephen Colbert's mock rally as the foundation for a discussion on the issue that fear is still far to prevalent in our culture (and our psyches). But Hanson is more concerned that we can no longer tell the difference between real threats (global climate change, environmental pollution) and false threats (terror level warnings, GLBT folks having equal rights).
The problem is that our brains are wired to be aware of threats and act accordingly - we have a hard time distinguishing between real and false threats in a highly complex world. Some people are using that to their advantage to control the culture and push their agenda.
Stephen Colbert: We Don't Need To 'Keep Fear Alive'
Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Posted: October 3, 2010Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have dueling rallies in DC coming soon. Stewart's is "Bring Back Sanity" and Colbert's is "Keep Fear Alive!"
But Colbert doesn't need a rally to keep fear alive. Alarming messages are all around us, like the news about global warming or the "Threat Level Orange" announcements every few minutes in the airport.
Some of those messages are true and worth heeding. For example, dumping carbon into the atmosphere must inevitably make the planet hotter; it's basic physics.
But others are wildly exaggerated: the actual odds of a bad event on your airplane flight are "Threat Level Chartreuse" -- a bucket of green paint with a drop of yellow.
How do we tell the difference between real threats and bogus ones? (This is important for many reasons; for one, chasing fake threats takes away resources from real issues.)
But it's tough to do, since evolution has given us a brain with what scientists call a "negativity bias" that makes it prone to feeling threatened. This bias developed because the ancient mammals, primates, and early humans that were all mellow and fearless did not notice the shadow overhead or slither nearby that CHOMP! killed them. The ones that survived to pass on their genes were nervous and cranky, and we are their great-grandchildren, sitting atop the food chain, armed with nuclear weapons.
Stephen Colbert, relax: Mother Nature is on your side, already working hard to keep fear alive.
Your brain is continually looking for bad news. As soon as it finds some, it fixates on it with tunnel vision, fast-tracks it into memory storage, and then reactivates it at the least hint of anything even vaguely similar. But good news gets a kind of neural shrug: "uh, whatever."
In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.
All this makes human beings super-sensitive to apparent threats. Basically, in evolution, there are two kinds of mistakes: (1) You think there is a tiger in the bushes but there isn't one, and (2) You think the coast is clear, no tiger in the bushes, but there really is one about to pounce.
These mistakes have very different consequences. The first one will make you anxious, but the second one will kill you. That's why Mother Nature wants you to make the first mistake a thousand times over in order to avoid making the second mistake even once.
This hard-wired tendency toward fear affects individuals, groups (from couples to multinational corporations), and nations. It makes them overestimate threats, underestimate opportunities, and underestimate resources.
Of course we need to deal with real tigers, real threats, ranging from leaky roofs to the shaky economy, national debt, terrorism, and global warming. But "keeping fear alive" for tigers that are nonexistent, manageably small, or made out of paper has huge costs.
At the personal level, fear feels bad, wears down physical and mental health, and makes people duck for cover in life and play small. (These individual costs also drag down the economy.)
Nationally, feeling threatened gets intensified by the classic drumbeat of alarms about inner and outer enemies from people who are good at trumping hope with fear. The result? Paper tiger paranoia - which makes us over-invest in threat protection, under-invest in infrastructure, miss real tigers because we're flooded with warnings about illusory or exaggerated ones, and over-react in ways that create new real tigers (like America's longest war, in Iraq).
The solution? It's to have the courage to see real tigers clearly and to deal with them effectively - and to refuse to be frightened and cowed by boys and girls crying tiger.
It also helps to get more skillful with your own brain: to understand how it makes you needlessly afraid, whether you're talking with a family member, doing a project at work, or watching the news - and most importantly, what you can do about that by using your mind alone to change your brain for the better.
Which is what I'll be exploring in my upcoming posts, including how to calm down threat reactivity, feel stronger and safer, recognize both real tigers and paper ones, and realize that in most situations most of the time, it is not "Threat Level Orange."
Meanwhile, let's not do anything more to keep fear alive. Mother Nature and Fox News are already doing a very good job there. Instead, let's do more to keep courage alive.
A great first step is to laugh at paper tigers.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Laura M. Henderson - Conceptualizing State of Emergency Thinking: A Theory of Discourse and Hegemony
Article download requires a free membership/registration at the Social Science Research Network, which is a nice resource to have anyway.
Laura M. Henderson
University of Utrecht
August 27, 2010
Abstract:
Since 9/11, the world has changed. Or at least, so the scholars and politicians tell us. There has been a perceived break with pre-9/11 thinking and governance (the ‘normal-time discourse’) and a new paradigm has emerged (the ‘time-of-emergency discourse’). This paper takes this shift as a starting point, seeing these types of thinking as discourses that shape and are shaped by conceptions of truth, proper behavior, and necessity. But the shift from normal-times to state of emergency is, in itself, not novel. America – and the world – have known many previous states of emergency, and have known many civil rights abuses conducted in the name of these states of emergency. Yet, here, again, a state of emergency discourse has emerged. What is it about this discourse that makes it so viable, despite our past experiences with the fundamental rights abuses that seem to accompany it? In other words, what is the function of this discourse? In this paper I will focus on answering this question in regard to the interaction between the discourse and the law. I will do this by way of a case study: the United States’ debate about indefinite preventive detention of terrorism suspects.
The Foucauldian approach to knowledge/power will inform my deconstruction of the state of emergency discourse, helping me reveal which power structures sustain this discourse and are sustained by it. But Foucault’s theory will not be enough – something more is needed to explain and understand the macro-level and normative implications of the current state of emergency thinking. For this purpose, I will draw on the works of another critical thinker, Antonio Gramsci. This critical approach will reveal a certain vulnerability of the law: namely, the law’s susceptibility to influence from non-democratically formed discourses.
Keywords: State of Emergency, Discourse, Gramsci, Foucault, War on Terror, Indefinite Detention
Working Paper SeriesDate posted: August 31, 2010 ; Last revised: August 31, 2010
Suggested Citation
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Adbusters - America's Identity Crisis
This article offers a little perspective for the Independence Day weekend. Those who see the 4th as something more than a day to barbecue and drink beer tend to celebrate America's greatness without questioning its dark side.Sifton makes a good point about how the 9/11 crisis damaged the American psyche, left us hyper-vigilant in defending ourselves preemptively against an enemy that does not have a state. We cannot continue to use the military as way to control the rest of the world - it's impossible.
Blake Sifton | 11 Jun 2010In the aftermath of the trauma suffered by the American psyche on 9/11, the United States lashed out blindly and irrationally in fear and anger, deploying its military to the corners of the world and weakening itself in the process. Now, over eight years later, with the economy in shambles and the military overstretched, the sun is setting on the American empire and experts say it’s time for the US public to accept their country’s declining prowess, pressure their government to reduce its global military footprint and prepare for a looming national identity crisis.
Political psychologists believe that the shock and horror of the 9/11 attacks damaged the collective American consciousness, causing the country to stumble forward with a misguided and self-destructive foreign policy intended to destroy an exaggerated enemy.
Dr. Deborah Larson, a political psychologist at UCLA, explains, “9/11 removed a sense of invulnerability that Americans had felt, and fear sprang from the uncertainty. We overreacted and tried to gain control of the world to eliminate even a small probability of being attacked. It was totally irrational.”
Dr. Richard Hermann, Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, says, “A weird combination of fear, panic, anger and crude patriotism made us obsessed with an exaggerated threat. The administration’s leadership watched this with excitement and believed it was their chance to shape the world.”
Though the United States has maintained a massive military presence around the world since the end of World War II, the reach of US forces expanded quickly after 9/11. Besides the huge undertakings in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military also established US Africa Command, expanded its presence in Latin America, began launching constant drone attacks in Pakistan, recently approved the sale of over 13 billion dollars in arms to Taiwan and is currently setting up missile defense systems in Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait among other countries.
With upwards of 800 bases in 120 countries, the United States continues to spend almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined at a time when the economy is plummeting and many Americans are struggling.
Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist and former Navy intelligence officer, believes that military overreach is eroding American power rather than projecting it: “The extension of US influence abroad is unsustainable and unaffordable and it weakens us politically, militarily and financially. We’re trying to be the Roman Empire and we’re going the way of them.”
Dr. Hermann worries that the money spent on military engagements will hurt America’s competitiveness in the future: “We’re spending 100 billion a year in Iraq alone. You could take the top 20 universities in America and fund them, make them free for everybody every year we’ve been there. It’s a terrible opportunity cost that we’ve paid.”
A psychological shift is underway in the United States as the evidence mounts and there is growing public awareness of the detrimental costs of maintaining such a large military. Dr. Hermann explains that a public suffering through the recession is more concerned about its financial well-being than its physical safety: “If you’re unemployed and you’re getting foreclosed on, you’re a lot less worried about al Qaeda.”
Nevertheless, political psychologists believe that guilt keeps the average person from speaking out against the economic effects of imperial overreach. “Only a small fraction of the public is willing to serve in the military and I think the rest of the people feel guilty that they aren’t enlisted and essentially get a free pass. They might not like it but they feel if they have to pay tax dollars its okay,” explains Dr. Hermann.
It is perhaps ironic that the American public still fears terrorism despite being bled dry maintaining the strongest military in human history. “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Madsen, “These are ragtag people living in caves.” Hermann is frustrated by the contradiction in military spending and the threat faced: “There is a big disconnect here. There is huge spending on the military but at the same time an understanding that the military can’t protect us against the most likely attacks.”
Guardian columnist and London School of Economics professor Martin Jacques is an expert on the rise of China. He feels that many Americans hold on to delusions of grandeur to keep their pride afloat, denying the reality of waning US power.
“The decline of American power will entail the progressive reduction of American overseas military commitments,” he says. “But a nation in decline finds it extremely difficult to let go. It’s a reluctant process and a form of retreat.”
Jacques watched his own country go through the painful ordeal. “Britain was very reluctant to let go, not just the political elite but also the people. They lived an imperial role and didn’t like losing it. It gave them status, it gave them power and the knowledge that it was our role and responsibility in the world.”
“The military enjoys a very privileged position in the American mind, and the same experience will be had in the United States.”
Military superiority is very closely tied to the American identity and many believe that continued public support for imperial overreach stems from a desire to maintain prestige rather than from pragmatic security concerns.
“It’s very disorienting to lose your national identity. Part of being an American means knowing that you are part of the most powerful military state,” explains Dr. Larson, “If the US were to withdraw from various parts of the world, people would fear that we were declining and were no longer a hegemon. We would lose a lot of our national pride and prestige.”
It is time for the US public to accept that the military cannot maintain a global monopoly on violence and that rather than protecting and enriching them, imperial endeavors invariably become costly, never-ending counterinsurgency campaigns against dedicated, dug-in enemies.
In order for the American psyche to forge a new identity in the face of shifting realities, the US public must demand the change that their president promised, must urge leaders to scale back overseas military commitments, focus on education, technology and innovation and embrace a global leadership role rooted in soft power and diplomacy.
–Blake Sifton
Friday, April 02, 2010
Robert Augustus Masters - Don't Give Fear a Thought
Wow - very powerful piece in the new Crucible of Awakening newsletter from Robert Masters. Giving our fear our full attention, being with it (presence) rather than obsessing about it (mind) really does help - it's the basis for Dialectical Behavior Therapy (as developed by Marsha Linehan) and so many of the other mindfulness based approaches to dealing with fear. However, my sense is that Masters takes it even deeper.
For fans of Robert Masters' work, he has a new book now available for pre-order at Amazon, which has received some seriously high-power endorsements.
When fearfulness infects you, neither avoid it nor let it recruit your mind. Don’t give it a thought.
Approach the infected areas with care. No antibiotic heroics, no psychosurgical wizardry, just ordinary everyday caring.
Touch the infection with undivided attention, while letting the raw reality of it touch you, penetrate you, shake you more awake. Make contact, intimate contact, allowing it to breathe, allowing to it vibrate, sound off, even grieve. Stop treating it like an adversary or disease.
When approached with sufficient care, fearfulness helps fuel our entry into a quality of openness wherein we cannot be threatened.
Fearfulness is our personified sense of separateness having a bad day.
Being invested in making a self out of our apparent separateness guarantees fearfulness. Nevertheless, the arising of fearfulness, however compelling, does not mean that we are afraid, but rather only that fear is present, coexisting with varying degrees of awareness of it.
When fearfulness does manage to infiltrate your mind, read its contents once-through as though they belonged to a supermarket tabloid, taking careful note of which headlines most easily snare your attention. Then immediately shift your attention, and shift it completely, to the physical correlates of your fearfulness, resisting the temptation to scoot back into your thinking mind.
Tour the somatic nooks, crannies, and grottos of your fearfulness, paying close attention to its textures, tones, directionality, shapings, and other anatomical peculiarities. Note that it is not static, not a noun, not a something inhabiting you, but rather a verb, a process, always on the move, riddled with impermanence.
Then ask yourself who or what it is that’s feeling fearful. Is it really you? Find out.
As you discover — and not just intellectually — that the awareness of fear is not itself at all afraid, then you can approach “your” fearfulness with a considerable degree of ease and spaciousness.
When we are sufficiently uprooted to be standing our true ground, we are positioned to be awakened by all things, including fearfulness The teacher is everywhere. Every moment is a potential crucible for awakening. It’s all a setup — set up by all — for realizing, totally realizing, what we actually are, asking only for undreaming eyes.
Fearfulness not only disturbs our sleep, but also can scare us scriptless. At that point — which may last for only a few seconds — we are so divested of our usual dramatics that we are the very openness for which we have yearned. All we have to do is not flee to the surface — like a dreamer desperately trying to exit a nightmare — but remain where we are. Then, into the openness that we are will flood all that is needed.
When we remain outside our fear, we remain trapped within it.
When we, however, consciously get inside our fear, it’s as if it turns inside out. Getting inside our fear with wakeful attention and compassion actually expands (or everts) our fear beyond itself. Once the contractedness that’s at the center of fear ceases to be fueled, fear unravels, dissipates, terminates its occupancy of us.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it.
Through attending closely, caringly, and carefully to the particulars of our fearfulness, we decentralize it, so that its intentions and viewpoint can no longer govern us.
When the light goes on in the grottos of dread, then fear is little more than Life-energy having a bad day. When we touch our fear with authentic caring, it de-tenses, de-compresses, usually quite quickly becoming something other than fear, something unburdened by fearful agendas or headlines. Fear met with an open heart does not usually take long to dissolve.
The key is to actively and decisively disidentify with our fear.
Don’t give fearfulness a thought.
Instead, give it your full attention. Go to its core. Its dark heart is but the shell, the calcified chambering, of a love beyond imagination, a love that effortlessly dissolves all fear.
Now available for pre-order on Amazon!
SPIRITUAL BYPASSING: WHEN SPIRITUALITY DISCONNECTS US FROM WHAT REALLY MATTERS
This, my next (and now-being-edited) book, will be published by North Atlantic Books this Summer. Here are a few of its endorsements:
“This is a wonderfully significant and important book, and is highly recommended. Its contents are truly mandatory for this day and age.”
— Ken Wilber, author of The Integral Vision
“This timely and penetrating analysis of spirituality’s shadow provides a much needed counterpoint for those who tend to get blinded by its light.”
— Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs
“There is much wisdom and good information in this book. Robert joins a growing number of wise teachers who understand that the personal and the universal must be combined to bring true and genuine spiritual awakening.”
— Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
“Traversing the muddy waters of contemporary spirituality requires a willingness to meet its seen and unseen challenges with ruthless self-honesty and keen discernment. Robert addresses “the many faces of spiritual bypassing” with intellectual rigor, hard-earned insight, and emotional intelligence. It is a lucid, well-written, and practical guide for both new and seasoned practitioners on the spiritual path.”
— Mariana Caplan, PhD, author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: the Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
Monday, March 08, 2010
Dr. Michael Davis - Neurobiology of Fear, Anxiety and Extinction: Implications for Psychotherapy
About the Lecture
Few scientists have charted the grim territory of fear and anxiety with the same doggedness and precision as Michael Davis.
Nearly four decades ago, researchers learned that animals, including humans, startle more when fearful. A sudden noise in a dark, creepy alley provokes a greater reaction than in a well-lit room, for instance. That got Davis and his colleagues wondering what neural mechanisms underlie the startle reflex, and how fear plays a part in the response.
In his talk, Davis describes the meticulous experiments he and others have conducted over many years. Starting with the fear potentiated startle test -- where animals are trained to pair a stimulus such as light, or sound, with a shock -- researchers began to track the pathways that mediate the response in the nervous system. Using chemical tracers that could follow electrical activity in the brain, Davis found a group of cells in the central nucleus of the amygdala that are critical for fear conditioning. “It was a nice day in the laboratory,” he says. When he knocked out this part of the amygdala with drugs or a lesion, it selectively decreased fear potentiated startle.
More studies produced maps showing that outputs of the central nucleus affect other areas of the brain involved in the symptoms of fear and anxiety, such as elevated blood pressure, sweating, clammy skin, panting and pupil dilation. Of particular interest to Davis, though, were the connections between the central nucleus and another part of the amygdale long thought to be interrelated, the bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST). When drugs inactivated the BNST, the startle response was completely blocked.
Davis began disentangling the mechanisms of these two areas, and found that a specific peptide, corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) “produces a constellation of behaviors that look very much like fear and anxiety” -- and acts on receptors only in the BNST. He began to test the idea of two systems acting in parallel in the brain: fear, of relatively short duration, orchestrated by the central nucleus; and anxiety, more diffuse and sustained, originating in the BNST.
Davis proposes that cognitive inputs (perhaps bad experiences and memories) help drive the release of CRH and long-term anxiety, including common debilitating phobias (fear of heights, darkness) and post-traumatic stress disorder. Research has shown that to extinguish such fears, new kinds of ‘inhibitory’ learning must take place. Davis recently discovered a compound, D-cycloserine, that has proved extremely promising in psychotherapy aimed at extinguishing phobias.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
NeuroPod - December 2009
NeuroPod
December 2009
In this episode:
A drug for Huntington's
A treatment that could prevent neurons from damage caused by overexcitement
Fair play to testosterone
A dose of the hormone makes behaviour fairer; thinking you've had a dose does the opposite
Learning to connect
What happens in the brain when we learn a new skill?
No fear
Erasing fearful memories without the need for drugs
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Robert Augustus Masters - EXCITEMENT IN DRAG: AN INSIDE LOOK AT FEAR
If you are looking for genuine transformation, you need
look no further than your fear.
In it there exists not only an abundance of trapped
energy, but also the very testing and challenge which we
need in order to live a deeper, more authentic life.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it...
EXCITEMENT IN DRAG:
AN INSIDE LOOK AT FEAR
As simplistic as it may sound, fear often is just excitement in endarkened
drag. If we are excited and then we contract, fear arises; if we are fearful
and then expand, excitement arises. Same energy, different context.
This is not all that difficult to recognize when we consider our fear
in its physical/physiological dimensions, but not so easy to recognize
when we consider our fear in its mental dimensions (chronic doubt, for
example).
One form that excitement can take (for better or for worse) is anger.
Not surprisingly, fear and anger are biochemically all but identical. Same
adrenaline, different directionality — fear retreats, anger moves forward.
Same adrenaline, different intentionality — fear avoids, anger engages.
Fear disempowers, whereas anger empowers, so long as it is not allowed
to mutate into aggression. When the fearful get truly angry, they are not
afraid any more, but just angry. Not that getting angry is the solution
for fearfulness — but the arising of anger can really empower us, in
contrast to the arising of fear.
Fear comes in many forms — worry, anxiety, panic, paranoia, angst,
terror, dread, doubt — but fundamentally is just apprehensive selfconstriction,
a contractile aversion that takes shape as a mildly to deeply
unpleasant gripping feeling that announces, compellingly and viscerally:
I am not safe; or I am threatened; or I am in danger.
This message — scrawled in our own blood — may often be impervious
to cognitive intervention. Consider the following example: If we suffered
a particularly difficult birth, with our vital signs having accelerated for a
significant amount of time into zones of extreme danger — so that our
biological survival was clearly at stake — we obviously didn’t mentally
reflect on our situation (our brain not being developmentally capable of
doing so), but rather automatically reacted by “doing” whatever most
quickly and effectively reduced the danger, like going neurologically
limp or “depressing” our vital signs.
Later in life, when in the presence of danger (real or imagined), we may
then not only get afraid, but may also revert, beyond any mental countereffort,
to what originally had “worked” to save our life — withdrawing,
shutting down, turning off, getting depressed, whatever does the job.
Many relationships are ruined or kept in the shallows by such reversion
(which is not always a result of birth trauma!) — the “depressing” of our
vitals signs both “saves” and debilitates us, making us all but incapable
of sustained intimacy.
However it manifests, fear very easily undercuts our rationality. Fear
that’s allowed to infiltrate our mind doesn’t waste any time generating
thoughts that support and amplify it.
Animals get afraid — demonstrating the physiology and characteristic
behaviors of fear — when actual danger is present and registers; the
electrifying biochemistry of fear immediately enables them to flee or,
less commonly, to freeze.
Humans, however, are usually far less practically inclined, at least after
infancy, getting afraid not only in the present, but also projecting
fearfulness into the past (as in guilt, which is shame injected with enough
fear to keep us small) and the future (as in worry or anxiety), generally
keeping ourselves not only chronically afraid, but also overcommitted or
enslaved to whatever most successfully keeps us sufficiently distanced
from our fear.
Fear can be adaptive or maladaptive. The rush of fear we feel when we
are getting too close to a precipice is useful, immediately alerting and
readying us for needed action (like stepping back). Worry, on the other
hand, is far from useful — when we permit it to gnaw at us, and to enlist
our cognition in its service, we’re only keeping ourselves off track, bound
up in a too narrowly framed view. Worry — which is socially acceptable
anxiety — keeps us spinning in a cranial cramp, until we leave for more
life-giving territory (perhaps after having “worried our head off ”).
To journey into, unguardedly feel, and directly relate to our fear (instead
of from it) requires that our usual distancing strategies, cognitive and
otherwise, be exposed and disarmed — assuming, of course, that it
is timely to do so. Our fear can then be touched and known from the
inside, and eventually divested of its power to shrink, misguide, or
intimidate us.
Our smaller fears, unpleasant as they might be, are not usually very
difficult to temporarily escape or sedate — we know what we are afraid
of; we are perhaps even oddly comforted by its uncomfortable or edgy
familiarity; and we know when to throw it a piece of meat and when
not to. We know it well enough to know how to take the edge off it,
through positive thinking, sex, food, drugs, intense exercise, electronic
fixes, and other such distracting preoccupations — such strategies give
us some sense of control, regardless of what they cost us.
That is, when our fear has a concrete, everyday object upon which to
focus or fixate, we are on miserable yet dependably familiar ground,
seemingly far from the quicksands of our deeper fears. Thus do we
tend to prefer the burdened beasts of depression to the monsters of
the deep.
And so thus do we tend to cling, however indirectly, to our everyday
fearfulness, focusing on its mental content much more than the raw
feeling itself. We then leave the nature of fear out of our inquiry,
settling instead for explanations for why we are afraid. It’s easy to use
our reasoning powers to distance ourselves from our fearfulness, yet
even from the loftiest and most seemingly safe neocortical towers we
are not entirely out of the reach of our core fears.
Until we move toward our fear, we will be bound by it.
The key to working effectively with fear is to get inside it.
This means, among other things, that we need to have a clear knowledge
of all the ways in which we have learned to get away from fear, so that
when one of them shows up, we’re capable of looking at it — rather than
through its eyes — and, to whatever degree, saying no thanks. Getting
inside fear means getting past its periphery, past its defining thoughts,
past its propagandizing sentinels. Entering the dragon’s cave.
Once we’re within fear, under its skin, with our attention scanning our
surroundings like a miner’s headlamp, we can begin acquainting ourselves
with its features, particularly those sensations and beliefs that together
make it into a something we label “fear.” The closer we get to it, the
better we can see it. However, we need to learn not to get close too
quickly, not to move so fast that we can’t keep digesting and integrating
what we’re experiencing.
When we remain outside our fear, we remain trapped in it.
When we, however, consciously get inside our fear, it’s as if it turns
inside out. Getting inside our fear with wakeful attention and compassion
actually expands our fear beyond itself. Once the contractedness at
the center of fear ceases to be fueled, fear unravels and dissipates,
terminating its occupancy of us.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Swiss Psychiatrist Fights Fear with LSD - Samiha Shafy
Swiss Psychiatrist Fights Fear with LSD
By Samiha Shafy
A Swiss psychiatrist is treating severely ill patients with LSD to alleviate their fear of pain and death. Other psychedelic drugs are being tested on patients in the United States, Britain and Israel. Are psychotropic substances about to make a comeback in therapy?
Nothing's happening, Udo Schulz thought to himself with quiet regret. I must have been given the placebo. He was lying on a mattress in a brightly lit room, waiting for the first real drug experience of his life.
Schulz, 44, is German and suffers from cancer. He is also the first person in more than three decades who has been allowed to consume LSD legally in the context of a scientific study. The goal of the study is to determine whether lysergic acid diethylamide, the notorious drug of the hippy era, could be useful in the treatment of certain emotional disorders.
It was May 13, 2008, and it was quiet, as it usually is, in Solothurn, a small, picturesque Baroque town at the foot of the Jura Mountains in Switzerland. The Aare River, a tributary of the Rhine, flows at a more leisurely pace here than it does in the Swiss capital Bern, past Roman walls, the Krummer Turm ("Crooked Tower") and the imposing Cathedral of St. Ursus. There could hardly be a better spot for a study with such a potentially explosive impact on society than this inconspicuous little Swiss town.
The wall of the treatment room was decorated with a red tapestry, a gong, a drum and a portrait of a smiling Buddha. Peter Gasser, a psychiatrist, and fellow therapist Barbara Speich crouched next to the patient on thin foam rubber mats.
They sat there for at least half an hour, waiting. "Then I finally sensed that something was changing in my psyche," recalls Schulz. "Wow, it was fantastic!"
Transported to a Different World
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized, ingested and discovered the effects of LSD in a laboratory at the pharmaceutical company Sandoz in Basel on April 19, 1943. Hofmann had originally intended to develop a circulatory stimulant derived from ergot, a fungus. Instead, he synthesized a highly potent hallucinogen. A single gram of LSD is sufficient to get 20,000 people high for hours.
Of course, the young scientist couldn't have known this on the day of his discovery. As a result, the first LSD trip in history began with a drastic overdose, when Hofmann swallowed 0.25 milligrams of the substance. "I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would go crazy," he later wrote, describing his experience. "I was transported to a different world, a different time." Hours passed before he gradually became calm again. "Now I gradually began to enjoy the unimaginable play of colors and shapes," he wrote. The next day, he wrote, he was filled with "a feeling of well-being and new life."
Hofmann couldn't have dreamed that LSD would soon become the catalyst of a mass movement, glorified by artists like the Beatles, the Doors, Pink Floyd, the actor Cary Grant and the author Aldous Huxley. Little did he suspect that the CIA would secretly use it in interrogations or that the hallucinogen would send millions of people on spiritual and creative adventures but also drive some to madness and suicide. Nevertheless, he was convinced from the start that LSD had to be suitable for providing "mental relaxation."
Many psychiatrists shared Hofmann's hope that the substance he had discovered could help them gain insights into suppressed memories and trauma. Until the 1970s, LSD was frequently used to treat depression, anxiety and addiction and, less commonly, migraines, arthritis, paralysis and skin complaints. Thousands of scientific studies were published during that time, most of which were of dubious quality. A famous case was that of Auschwitz survivor Yehiel De-Nur, who, in six LSD sessions in 1976, relived his memories of the death camp. He later published a poetic and deeply disturbing book entitled "Shivitti: A Vision" about the experience.
Albert Hofmann's Problem Child
LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann died at the age of 102 on April 29, 2008 -- just two weeks before Udo Schulz was to travel by train from Murnau in Bavaria to Solothurn to take LSD as the first subject in the study. Schulz hoped that the substance could help him face the fears that had tormented him ever since he was diagnosed with cancer.
Hofmann had always warned against the dangers posed by his "problem child," and yet he continued to believe in the drug's healing powers up until his death. For the old man, the fact that research into the medical uses of LSD was now continuing after a 35-year hiatus represented the fulfillment of his "greatest wish in life."
Study director Gasser carries a heavy burden of responsibility. It isn't just a question of doing justice to Albert Hofmann's legacy. Many scientists from the United States and Europe, who have been fighting for years to be allowed to continue research into LSD and other psychedelic substances, are now pinning their hopes on the Solothurn-based psychiatrist.
"I would welcome it if it were easier to use psychoactive substances in therapy," says Rolf Verres, medical director of the Department of Medical Psychology at the University of Heidelberg Hospital. "In Germany, there is simply a deficit in this respect."
Elsewhere, however, a comeback of hallucinogens in psychotherapy seems possible. In the United States, Britain, Israel and Switzerland, a number of studies have been recently approved involving the use of Ecstasy and psilocybin, an agent derived from hallucinogenic mushrooms. The goal of the research is to determine whether these substances can help in the treatment of traumatized war veterans and patients with anxiety disorders. Some of the researchers involved in the studies say that initial results are consistently encouraging.
But before Peter Gasser embarked on his study, no researcher had dared to use LSD, the strongest and most notorious of the hallucinogenic drugs. The outcome of his study will play a key role in determining how authorities handle similar applications in the future.
'I Am Not a Messiah'
Gasser, 49, ignored media inquiries from around the world for almost one-and-a-half years, so as not to jeopardize his sensitive experiment. Today, as he invites SPIEGEL to visit his practice for the first time, the first thing he does is to make one thing clear: "I am not a messiah, nor am I someone who aims to change society." He is interested exclusively in research, not creeping legalization of the drug, says Gasser, and he wants to demonstrate that LSD can play a positive role in psychotherapy.
Gasser is the president of the small Swiss Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy, which advocates the therapeutic use of hallucinogens. The organization has about 50 members, of which about one-third are based in Germany. In the early 1990s, Gasser completed supplementary therapeutic training with psychedelic drugs, when it was still possible to do so in Switzerland with a special permit. He also tried LSD as part of the training.
The drug's effect has a lot to do with the setting in which it is taken, says Gasser. "We create a relaxed atmosphere here, which is why the patients remain calm." Music is sometimes played in the background during a session, and Gasser occasionally plays the drum which is hanging on the wall. So far, none of the subjects has had a bad trip, he says, and the sedative that is kept on hand for emergencies has never been used. "If you handle LSD with care," the psychiatrist claims, "it isn't any more dangerous than other therapies."
The drug is chemically related to serotonin, a neurotransmitter produced naturally in the body. It affects the same regions of the brain, particularly the limbic system, where sensory input is filtered, processed and evaluated emotionally. LSD essentially disables the filtering function, so that the brain is flooded with information. It also elevates the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the so-called corpus striatum, further amplifying sensory overload.
As a result, the drug influences sensory perception, thought and moods. The sense of space and time changes, and the boundary between the self and the environment becomes blurred. This can be perceived as an exhilarating feeling of becoming one with the environment, or as a frightening loss of control over one's body and thoughts. Experts are unanimous in the view that LSD is not physically or emotionally addictive, however.
Part 2: 'A Feeling of Mystical Oneness'
But can the high truly help people to overcome their fears? Borwin Bandelow, a psychiatry professor at the University of Göttingen and Germany's most prominent expert on anxiety, is skeptical. "For every therapy in the world, you will find someone who tells you this sort of thing," he says. Nevertheless, says Bandelow, he would like to see the effects of psychoactive substances for the treatment of anxiety examined in well-controlled studies. "It's an extremely interesting subject," he says.
Altered sensory perception, objects that suddenly seem alive and the feeling of floating in mid-air are all spectacular, of course, says Gasser -- but they are merely secondary phenomena. More important, he says, is the deep self-awareness and the trusting relationship the patient can quickly develop with the therapist. "It can only be achieved at this intensity using LSD," he says.
Within the framework of the study, Gasser is permitted to treat 12 patients suffering from anxiety disorders as a result of a severe physical illness. Eight of them receive a capsule of 200 micrograms of LSD each, in two full-day sessions spaced several weeks apart. The remaining four patients, the control group, receive a dose of 20 micrograms, which is too small to have much of an effect. "With a substance like LSD, a placebo-controlled procedure is, of course, questionable," Gasser admits, noting that the patient quickly realizes what he or she has swallowed. But that is just the way things are done in medicament research, he says.
The three patients who have received the effective dose to date have all benefited from the treatment, says Gasser, but the study is still underway. Besides, he adds, a study group of only 12 patients is much too small to be able to make statistically valid statements. "What we hope to demonstrate in the end is that no serious incidents occurred, and that the results suggest that this is an effective treatment method."
'The Entire Room Suddenly Came Alive'
Udo Schulz finds it difficult to articulate his drug experience. He hesitates as he begins his account. "The potted plant, the tapestry, the entire room suddenly came alive," he says, interlacing his fingers and gazing meditatively out the window. And then, after a pause, he says: "You could say it was a feeling of mystical oneness."
Schulz's problems began in the spring of 2006. He had just started a new job as an orderly in a nursing home. At first, he attributed a growing loss of appetite to the stresses of the job. Then he noticed a feeling of pressure in his stomach after meals. He ate less and lost weight. Finally, a doctor sent him to the nearest hospital. After being hospitalized for several days, he was handed his file and sent to a final examination. "On the way there, I read the file, and I saw that the diagnosis was stomach cancer."
How does one react to this kind of information? "Well, at first I thought: This isn't my file. It's impossible. I've always lived a healthy life," says Schulz, twisting his mouth into a thin smile.
But he realized that he had to undergo surgery. One-third of his esophagus and a large part of his stomach were removed. The doctors did not find any signs that the cancer had spread and so Schulz did not need to do chemotherapy.
After that, however, fear began to dominate his life. He was tormented by the thought of never being productive again, of never regaining his strength, of losing his job and having to give up. He exhausted himself with his efforts to return to work and he suffered from insomnia. Conversational therapy with a psychologist did not help very much.
When Schulz happened upon an article on the Internet about the LSD study in Switzerland, it immediately appealed to him. "The preliminary tests showed that I'm apparently a person who suffers from these symptoms of anxiety," he says.
It has been a year since the LSD therapy, and Schulz is now working full-time again. Several months ago, he began working in outpatient geriatric care, which allows him to schedule his time more flexibly and take breaks. He hopes that the changes will enable him to cope with full-time work. He keeps himself physically fit by riding his bicycle and playing table tennis several times a week.
Schulz is convinced that the LSD helped him. The drug, he says, gave him a gentle push, an energy boost at a time when he felt miserable and listless. During the trip, he says, he felt for the first time his entire sadness and anger at the cancer. "All of a sudden, I was able to cry like a baby," he says, smiling again.
There is only one thing he regrets, says Schulz: The two sessions were much too short. "I would like to continue the LSD therapy," says Schulz, staring out the window. "But not if it's illegal."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Freedom from Fear by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Another great article from Thanissaro Bhikkhu - this one addresses fear and how to work with it and release our attachment to it.
An anthropologist once questioned an Alaskan shaman about his tribe's belief system. After putting up with the anthropologist's questions for a while, the shaman finally told him: "Look. We don't believe. We fear."
His words have intrigued me ever since I first heard them. I've also been intrigued by the responses I get when I share his words with my friends. Some say that the shaman unconsciously put his finger on the line separating primitive religion from civilized religion: primitive religion is founded on childish fear; civilized religion, on love, trust, and joy. Others maintain that the shaman cut through the pretensions and denials of civilized religion and pointed to the true source of all serious religious life.
If we dig down to the assumptions underlying these two responses, we find that the first response views fear itself as our greatest weakness. If we can simply overcome fear, we put ourselves in a position of strength. The second sees fear as the most honest response to our greater weakness in the face of aging, illness, and death — a weakness that can't be overcome with a simple change in attitude. If we're not in touch with our honest fears, we won't feel motivated to do what's needed to protect ourselves from genuine dangers.
So — which attitude toward fear is childish, and which is mature? Is there an element of truth in both? If so, how can those elements best be combined? These questions are best answered by rephrasing them: To what extent is fear a useful emotion? To what extent is it not? Does it have a role in the practice that puts an end to fear?
The Buddhist answer to these questions is complex. This is due partly to Buddhism's dual roots — both as a civilized and as a wilderness tradition — and also to the complexity of fear itself, even in its most primal forms. Think of a deer at night suddenly caught in a hunter's headlights. It's confused. Angry. It senses danger, and that it's weak in the face of the danger. It wants to escape. These five elements — confusion, aversion, a sense of danger, a sense of weakness, and a desire to escape — are present, to a greater or lesser extent, in every fear. The confusion and aversion are the unskillful elements. Even if the deer has many openings to escape from the hunter, its confusion and aversion might cause it to miss them. The same holds true for human beings. The mistakes and evils we commit when finding ourselves weak in the face of danger come from confusion and aversion.
Maddeningly, however, there are also evils that we commit out of complacency, when oblivious to actual dangers: the callous things we do when we feel we can get away with them. Thus the last three elements of fear — the perception of weakness, the perception of danger, and the desire to escape it — are needed to avoid the evils coming from complacency. If stripped of confusion and aversion, these three elements become a positive quality, heedfulness — something so essential to the practice that the Buddha devoted his last words to it. The dangers of life are real. Our weaknesses are real. If we don't see them clearly, don't take them to heart, and don't try to find a way out, there's no way we can put an end to the causes of our fears. Just like the deer: if it's complacent about the hunter's headlights, it's going to end up strapped to the fender for sure.
So to genuinely free the mind from fear, we can't simply deny that there's any reason for fear. We have to overcome the cause of fear: the mind's weaknesses in the face of very real dangers. The elegance of the Buddha's approach to this problem, though, lies in his insight into the confusion — or to use the standard Buddhist term, the delusion — that makes fear unskillful. Despite the complexity of fear, delusion is the single factor that, in itself, is both the mind's prime weakness and its greatest danger. Thus the Buddha approaches the problem of fear by focusing on delusion, and he attacks delusion in two ways: getting us to think about its dangerous role in making fear unskillful, and getting us to develop inner strengths leading to the insights that free the mind from the delusions that make it weak. In this way we not only overcome the factor that makes fear unskillful. We ultimately put the mind in a position where it has no need for fear.
When we think about how delusion infects fear and incites us to do unskillful things, we see that it can act in two ways. First, the delusions surrounding our fears can cause us to misapprehend the dangers we face, seeing danger where there is none, and no danger where there is. If we obsess over non-existent or trivial dangers, we'll squander time and energy building up useless defenses, diverting our attention from genuine threats. If, on the other hand, we put the genuine dangers of aging, illness, and death out of our minds, we grow complacent in our actions. We let ourselves cling to things — our bodies, our loved ones, our possessions, our views — that leave us exposed to aging, illness, separation, and death in the first place. We allow our cravings to take charge of the mind, sometimes to the point of doing evil with impunity, thinking we're immune to the results of our evil, that those results will never return to harm us.
The more complacent we are about the genuine dangers lying in wait all around us, the more shocked and confused we become when they actually hit. This leads to the second way in which the delusions surrounding our fears promote unskillful actions: we react to genuine dangers in ways that, instead of ending the dangers, actually create new ones. We amass wealth to provide security, but wealth creates a high profile that excites jealousy in others. We build walls to keep out dangerous people, but those walls become our prisons. We stockpile weapons, but they can easily be turned against us.
The most unskillful response to fear is when, perceiving dangers to our own life or property, we believe that we can gain strength and security by destroying the lives and property of others. The delusion pervading our fear makes us lose perspective. If other people were to act in this way, we would know they were wrong. But somehow, when we feel threatened, our standards change, our perspective warps, so that wrong seems right as long as we're the ones doing it.
This is probably the most disconcerting human weakness of all: our inability to trust ourselves to do the right thing when the chips are down. If standards of right and wrong are meaningful only when we find them convenient, they have no real meaning at all.
Fortunately, though, the area of life posing the most danger and insecurity is the area where, through training, we can make the most changes and exercise the most control. Although aging, illness, and death follow inevitably on birth, delusion doesn't. It can be prevented. If, through thought and contemplation, we become heedful of the dangers it poses, we can feel motivated to overcome it. However, the insights coming from simple thought and contemplation aren't enough to fully understand and overthrow delusion. It's the same as with any revolution: no matter how much you may think about the matter, you don't really know the tricks and strengths of entrenched powers until you amass your own troops and do battle with them. And only when your own troops develop their own tricks and strengths can they come out on top. So it is with delusion: only when you develop mental strengths can you see through the delusions that give fear its power. Beyond that, these strengths can put you in a position where you are no longer exposed to dangers ever again.
The Canon lists these mental strengths at five: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. It also emphasizes the role that heedfulness plays in developing each, for heedfulness is what enables each strength to counteract a particular delusion that makes fear unskillful, and the mind weak in the face of its fears. What this means is that none of these strengths are mere brute forces. Each contains an element of wisdom and discernment, which gets more penetrating as you progress along the list.
Of the five strengths, conviction requires the longest explanation, both because it's one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated factors in the Buddhist path, and because of the multiple delusions it has to counteract.
The conviction here is conviction in the principle of karma: that the pleasure and pain we experience depends on the quality of the intentions on which we act. This conviction counteracts the delusion that "It's not in my best interest to stick to moral principles in the face of danger," and it attacks this delusion in three ways.
First, it insists on what might be called the "boomerang" or "spitting into the wind" principle of karmic cause and effect. If you act on harmful intentions, regardless of the situation, the harm will come back to you. Even if unskillful actions such as killing, stealing, or lying might bring short-term advantages, these are more than offset by the long-term harm to which they leave you exposed.
Conversely, this same principle can make us brave in doing good. If we're convinced that the results of skillful intentions will have to return to us even if death intervenes, we can more easily make the sacrifices demanded by long-term endeavors for our own good and that of others. Whether or not we live to see the results in this lifetime, we're convinced that the good we do is never lost. In this way, we develop the courage needed to build a store of skillful actions — generous and virtuous — that forms our first line of defense against dangers and fear.
Second, conviction insists on giving priority to your state of mind above all else, for that's what shapes your intentions. This counteracts the corollary to the first delusion: "What if sticking to my principles makes it easier for people to do me harm?" This question is based ultimately on the delusion that life is our most precious possession. If that were true, it would be a pretty miserable possession, for it heads inexorably to death. Conviction views our life as precious only to the extent that it's used to develop the mind, for the mind — when developed — is something that no one, not even death, can harm. "Quality of life" is measured by the quality and integrity of the intentions on which we act, just as "quality time" is time devoted to the practice. Or, in the Buddha's words:
Better than a hundred years
lived without virtue, uncentered, is
one day
lived by a virtuous person
absorbed in jhana.— Dhp 110
Third, conviction insists that the need for integrity is unconditional. Even though other people may throw away their most valuable possession — their integrity — it's no excuse for us to throw away ours. The principle of karma isn't a traffic ordinance in effect only on certain hours of the day or certain days of the week. It's a law operating around the clock, around the cycles of the cosmos.
Some people have argued that, because the Buddha recognized the principle of conditionality, he would have no problem with the idea that our virtues should depend on conditions as well. This is a misunderstanding of the principle. To begin with, conditionality doesn't simply mean that everything is changeable and contingent. It's like the theory of relativity. Relativity doesn't mean that all things are relative. It simply replaces mass and time — which long were considered constants — with another, unexpected constant: the speed of light. Mass and time may be relative to a particular inertial frame, as the frame relates to the speed of light, but the laws of physics are constant for all inertial frames, regardless of speed.
In the same way, conditionality means that there are certain unchanging patterns to contingency and change — one of those patterns being that unskillful intentions, based on craving and delusion, invariably lead to unpleasant results.
If we learn to accept this pattern, rather than our feelings and opinions, as absolute, it requires us to become more ingenious in dealing with danger. Instead of following our unskillful knee-jerk reactions, we learn to think outside the box to find responses that best prevent harm of any kind. This gives our actions added precision and grace.
At the same time, we have to note that the Buddha didn't teach conditionality simply to encourage acceptance for the inevitability of change. He taught it to show how the patterns underlying change can be mastered to create an opening that leads beyond conditionality and change. If we want to reach the unconditioned — the truest security — our integrity has to be unconditional, a gift of temporal security not only to those who treat us well, but to everyone, without exception. As the texts say, when you abstain absolutely from doing harm, you give a great gift — freedom from danger to limitless beings — and you yourself find a share in that limitless freedom as well.
Conviction and integrity of this sort make great demands on us. Until we gain our first taste of the unconditioned, they can easily be shaken. This is why they have to be augmented with other mental strengths. The three middle strengths — persistence, mindfulness, and concentration — act in concert. Persistence, in the form of right effort, counteracts the delusion that we're no match for our fears, that once they arise we have to give into them. Right effort gives us practice in eliminating milder unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their place, so that when stronger unskillful qualities arise, we can use our skillful qualities as allies in fending them off. The strength of mindfulness assists this process in two ways. (1) It reminds us of the danger of giving in to fear. (2) It teaches us to focus our attention, not on the object of our fear, but on the fear in and of itself as a mental event, something we can watch from the outside rather jumping in and going along for a ride. The strength of concentration, in providing the mind with a still center of wellbeing, puts us in a solid position where we don't feel compelled to identify with fears as they come, and where the comings and goings of internal and external dangers are less and less threatening to the mind.
Even then, though, the mind can't reach ultimate security until it uproots the causes of these comings and goings, which is why the first four strengths require the strength of discernment to make them fully secure. Discernment is what sees that these comings and goings are ultimately rooted in our sense of "I" and "mine," and that "I" and "mine" are not built into experience. They come from the repeated processes of I-making and my-making, in which we impose these notions on experience and identify with things subject to aging, illness, and death. Furthermore, discernment sees through our inner traitors and weaknesses: the cravings that want us to make an "I" and "mine"; the delusions that make us believe in them once they're made. It realizes that this level of delusion is precisely the factor that makes aging, illness, and death dangerous to begin with. If we didn't identify with things that age, grow ill, and die, their aging, illness, and death wouldn't threaten the mind. Totally unthreatened, the mind would have no reason to do anything unskillful ever again.
When this level of discernment matures and bears the fruit of release, our greatest insecurity — our inability to trust ourselves — has been eliminated. Freed from the attachments of "I" and "mine," we find that the component factors of fear — both skillful and unskillful — are gone. There's no remaining confusion or aversion; the mind is no longer weak in the face of danger; and so there's nothing from which we need to escape.
This is where the questions raised by the shaman's remarks find their answers. We fear because we believe in "we." We believe in "we" because of the delusion in our fear. Paradoxically, though, if we love ourselves enough to fear the suffering that comes from unskillful actions and attachments, and learn to believe in the way out, we'll develop the strengths that allow us to cut through our cravings, delusions, and attachments. That way, the entire complex — the "we," the fear, the beliefs, the attachments — dissolves away. The freedom remaining is the only true security there is.
This teaching may offer cold comfort to anyone who wants the impossible: security for his or her attachments. But in trading away the hope for an impossible security, you gain the reality of a happiness totally independent and condition-free. Once you've made this trade, you know that the pay-off is more than worth the price. As one of the Buddha's students once reported, "Before, when I was a householder, maintaining the bliss of kingship, I had guards posted within and without the royal apartments, within and without the city, within and without the countryside. But even though I was thus guarded, thus protected, I dwelled in fear — agitated, distrustful, and afraid. But now, on going alone to a forest, to the foot of a tree, or to an empty dwelling, I dwell without fear, unagitated, confident, and unafraid — unconcerned, unruffled, my wants satisfied, with my mind like a wild deer. This is the meaning I have in mind that I repeatedly exclaim, 'What bliss! What bliss!'"
His deer is obviously not the deer in the headlights. It's a deer safe in the wilderness, at its ease wherever it goes. What makes it more than a deer is that, free from attachment, it's called a "consciousness without surface." Light goes right through it. The hunter can't shoot it, for it can't be seen.
Provenance:©2002 Thanissaro Bhikkhu.Transcribed from a file provided by the author.This Access to Insight edition is ©2002–2009 John T. Bullitt.Terms of use: You may copy, reformat, reprint, republish, and redistribute this work in any medium whatsoever, provided that: (1) you only make such copies, etc. available free of charge; (2) you clearly indicate that any derivatives of this work (including translations) are derived from this source document; and (3) you include the full text of this license in any copies or derivatives of this work. Otherwise, all rights reserved. For additional information about this license, see the FAQ.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
AlterNet - Is Hysterical Right-Wing Media Pushing the Unhinged Over the Edge?
And so what does the right wing media do? They poor gasoline on the fear, and possibly generate the kind of violence we saw in Pittsburgh last week.
AlterNet has collected some of the comments from their readers into this post, which offers some perspective from the public (admittedly the liberal public) on how the right is making this mess worse, and inciting violence.
Is Hysterical Right-Wing Media Pushing the Unhinged Over the Edge?