Duane Elgin - 8 Expressions of Simplicity for Healthy Living

Another good post from Duane Elgin at Huffington Post - here he offers some simple ways to bring simplicity into our practices for healthy living.

8 Expressions of Simplicity for Healthy Living


Duane Elgin, Speaker, Author, Non-Partisan Media Activist

To portray the richness of simplicity as a theme for healthy living, here are eight different flowerings that I see growing consciously in the "garden of simplicity." Although there is overlap among them, each expression of simplicity seems sufficiently distinct to warrant a separate category. These are presented in no particular order, as all are important.

1. Uncluttered Simplicity. Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on clutter, complications and trivial distractions, both material and non-material, and focusing on the essentials -- whatever those may be for each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, "Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, simplify." Or, as Plato wrote, "In order to seek one's own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life."


2. Ecological Simplicity. Simplicity means choosing ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and reduce our ecological impact on the web of life. This life-path remembers our deep roots with the soil, air and water. It encourages us to connect with nature, the seasons and the cosmos. An ecological simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the non-human realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well as the human.


3. Family Simplicity. Simplicity means to place the well-being of one's family ahead of materialism and the acquisition of things. This expression of green living puts an emphasis on giving children healthy role models of a balanced life that are not distorted by consumerism. Family simplicity affirms that what matters most in life is often invisible -- the quality and integrity of our relationships with one another and the rest of life. Family simplicity is also intergenerational -- it looks ahead and seeks to live with restraint so as to leave a healthy earth for future generations.


4. Compassionate Simplicity. Simplicity means to feel such a strong sense of kinship with others that, as Gandhi said, we "choose to live simply so that others may simply live." A compassionate simplicity means feeling a bond with the community of life and being drawn toward a path of cooperation and fairness that seeks a future of mutually assured development in all areas of life for everyone.

5. Soulful Simplicity. Simplicity means to approach life as a meditation and to cultivate our experience of direct connection with all that exists. By living simply, we can more easily awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soulful simplicity consciously tastes life in its unadorned richness rather than being concerned with a particular standard or manner of material living. In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.


6. Business Simplicity. Simplicity means a new kind of economy is growing in the world, with healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds (such as home-building materials, energy systems, food production and transportation systems). As the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is combined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces and transportation systems of developed nations, it is generating an enormous wave of green business innovation and employment.


7. Civic Simplicity. Simplicity means living more lightly and sustainably on the earth, and this requires, in turn, changes in many areas of public life -- from public transportation and education to the design of our cities and workplaces. To develop policies of civic simplicity involves giving close and sustained attention to media politics, as the mass media are the primary vehicle for reinforcing -- or transforming -- the social norms of consumerism. To realize the magnitude of changes required in such a brief time requires new approaches to communicating with ourselves as different communities of citizens. 


8. Frugal Simplicity. Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives, and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances we can achieve greater financial independence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the earth and frees resources for others.


As these eight approaches illustrate, the growing culture of simplicity contains a flourishing garden of expressions whose great diversity -- and intertwined unity -- are creating a resilient and hardy ecology of learning about how to live more sustainable and meaningful lives. As with other ecosystems, it is the diversity of expressions that fosters flexibility, adaptability and resilience. Because there are so many pathways into the garden of simplicity, this self-organizing movement has enormous potential to grow. 


~ Duane Elgin is a speaker, author and non-partisan activist for media accountability. He is the author of "Voluntary Simplicity," "The Living Universe," "Promise Ahead," and other books. Please visit his website, www.DuaneElgin.com for free articles and videos on thriving in these challenging times. Your comments and suggestions are much appreciated. 

Duane Elgin - Simplicity Is Not Sacrifice!

Another good column from Duane Elgin on his Huffington Post/AOL blog - glad to see content like his getting a wider audience. I first read Voluntary Simplicity when I was working at Park Place Books in Kirkland, WA - across the lake from Seattle. Great book.

Simplicity Is Not Sacrifice!

Duane Elgin, Speaker, Author, Educator, Media Activist

There is a common misconception that living more simply requires a life of sacrifice. In fact, it is just the opposite: When we live more lightly on the material side of life, we create the conditions for greater satisfaction and meaning on the non-material side of life. Lifestyles emphasizing consumerism are the ones that require sacrifice:

• Sacrifice is a lifestyle that is overstressed, overbusy, and overworked.
• Sacrifice is investing long hours doing work that is neither meaningful nor satisfying.
• Sacrifice is being apart from family and community to earn a living.
• Sacrifice is the stress of commuting long distances and coping with traffic.
• Sacrifice is the white noise of civilization blotting out the subtle sounds of nature.
• Sacrifice is hiding nature's beauty behind a jumble of billboard advertisements.
• Sacrifice is the smell of the city stronger than the scent of the Earth.
• Sacrifice is carrying more than 200 toxic chemicals in our bodies.
• Sacrifice is the massive extinction of plants and animals and an impoverished biosphere.
• Sacrifice is being cut off from nature's wildness and wisdom.
• Sacrifice is global climate disruption, crop failure, famine, and forced migration.
• Sacrifice is the absence of feelings of neighborliness and community.
• Sacrifice is the lack of opportunity for soulful encounters with others.
• Sacrifice is feeling divided among the different parts of our lives.

Voluntary simplicity is not sacrifice:

• Simplicity fosters a more harmonious relationship with the Earth.
• Simplicity promotes fairness and equity among the people of the Earth.
• Simplicity cuts through needless busyness, clutter, and complications.
• Simplicity enhances living with balance--inner and outer, work and family, and more.
• Simplicity reveals the beauty and intelligence of nature's designs.
• Simplicity increases the resources available for future generations.
• Simplicity helps save animal and plant species from extinction.
• Simplicity responds to global shortages of oil, water, and other vital resources.
• Simplicity emphasizes our relationships with family, community, nature, and the universe.
• Simplicity yields lasting satisfactions that exceed the fleeting pleasures of consumerism.
• Simplicity fosters the sanity of self-discovery and an integrated approach to life.
• Simplicity blossoms in community and connects us to the world with a feeling of belonging.
• Simplicity is a lighter lifestyle that fits elegantly into the real world.

Contrary to media myths, consumerism offers lives of sacrifice while simplicity offers lives of opportunity. Simplicity creates the opportunity for greater fulfillment in work, meaningful connection with others, feelings of kinship with all life, and awe of a living universe. This is a rich way of life that offers a compelling alternative to the stress, busyness, and alienation of the modern era.

If the material consumption of a fraction of humanity is already harming the planet, is there an alternative path that enables all of humanity to live more lightly upon the Earth while experiencing a higher quality of life? The insights described above offer a resounding answer: "Yes, there is!"

This Blogger's Books:

The Living Universe: Where Are We? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?
by Duane Elgin

Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich
by Duane Elgin

Tags: culture, personal growth, simplicity, Spirituality, Duane Elgin, Simplicity Is Not Sacrifice, Huffington Post, AOL, Voluntary simplicity, sacrifice, sustainability, consumerism, attachments

Buddhist Geeks 212: Redesigning Zen w/ Taiun Elliston

This week Vince speaks with Taiun Elliston on how he combines his background as a designer with his Soto Zen practice.

Buddhist Geeks 212: Redesigning Zen

28. Mar, 2011 by Taiun Elliston

Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston, Roshi received his higher education in Chicago at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (Received B.S. 1964 and M.S. 1970) From 1966 to 1970 he taught art and design at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and enjoyed a successful career in industrial and graphic design serving diverse national accounts.

In 1966 Roshi met Matsuoka Roshi, founder of the Chicago Zen Buddhist Temple. After training under Matsuoka-Roshi, he underwent Lay Ordination (Zaike Tokudo) and was given the dharma name Taiun, meaning “Great Cloud”. He was registered with the Soto Shu in Japan July 13, 1969 (Priesthood Register No. 164); ordained as a Zen Priest March 22, 1970. After which he moved to Atlanta and began offering Zen meditation and in 1977 founded the Atlanta Soto Zen Center. Taiun was presented the title of Osho (“authentic”) on September 20, 1983, and underwent a formal transmission ceremony (Shiho) with Shohaku Okumura Roshi on August 5, 2007.

Website: SilentThunderOrder.org

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Episode Description:

We’re joined this week by Soto Zen teacher Zenkai Taiun Elliston. Along with the being the abbot of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, Taiun is also a long-time professional designer, having trained and taught modern design. We ask him to share his perspective on the interplay and parallels between the two fields, which brings about a very interesting conversation about the aesthetic of simplicity, the importance of sensory engagement, and the nature of the medium we are exploring, whether it’s a physical medium, as in design, or the medium of consciousness itself, as in Zen.

Episode Links:

• Silent Thunder Order
• Atlanta Soto Zen Center
• Bauhaus Design

Transcript

Tags: Buddhist Geeks, podcast, 212, Redesigning Zen, Taiun Elliston, Vince Horn, Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston, Roshi, Matsuoka Roshi, Atlanta Soto Zen Center, Osho, Shohaku Okumura Roshi, Silent Thunder Order, Buddhism, dharma, simplicity

Adbusters - Glimpsing the Apocalypse

Very interesting article by Richard Bruce Anderson, a leader in the voluntary simplicity movement.

Glimpsing the Apocalypse

We live in a mythical era, a time that surpasses legend.

Richard Bruce Anderson
15 Dec 2009

MAURO GUZMÁN (ROSARIO, ARGENTINA – 1977)

We live in a mythical era, a time that surpasses legend. We’re witnessing a dazzling triumph of technology, an archetypal summoning of powers that are indistinguishable from true magic. But that triumph is hollow and destructive to much of what we value. The more we humans use our powers to impose order on the world, the more disorder there is. There are wars, and premonitory shadows of wars to come, as the world economy becomes ever more leveraged and dependent on scarce and finite resources. In the background there’s a steady slippage toward irreversible climate change and ecological collapse. And the astounding material success of the human endeavor hasn’t brought happiness, wisdom or enlightenment; instead there’s a profound disturbance in our collective human psyche. The best evidence of that disturbance is to be found in our suicidal abuse of nature, but we can also see its effects in the narcissism and desperation that are endemic in our society. Something is wrong at a very fundamental level – something that’s causing us to behave maladaptively.

What could have caused this imbalance? Given our brilliance and our accomplishments, what makes us behave so stupidly? Our innate human failings, our pride and greed and narcissism, must have a major part in it. But that’s not necessarily the whole story. In addition to human nature there’s another causal force at work, a force that we ourselves created: the industrial machine.

We humans have organized our economic affairs in a variety of ways in the past, but the way we make our living now is new in human history. Over the past five decades we’ve created an economy based on ever-increasing consumption, an economy that does not simply satisfy needs, but sets out to create them. We’ve left necessity and restraint behind to enter a world in which gross excess is the norm. This way of organizing life originated in the United States, but it’s spreading rapidly all over the world. It’s the principal threat to the natural world that sustains us and to the health of our culture our minds and our souls.

A self-organizing system, the consumer economy is a force all its own, an entity separate from ourselves. We built it, but we don’t control it. As the Dalai Lama remarked in Ethics for the New Millennium, “Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge self-propelled machine. Instead of human beings in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves.” The machine operates by its own rules, rules that only indirectly involve humans.

The first rule is that the economy as a whole must grow. A steady-state economy might be possible in a physical sense, but when growth slows, problems like unemployment emerge, and so far no one’s been willing to undertake the tinkering that would be necessary to correct the problems. At present there’s no room in our way of thinking for anything but growth. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in A Journey Through Economic Time: “In modern times growth … has become the accepted test of economic performance. An economy, like a healthy adolescent, is assumed to have an inherent commitment thereto … For economists and many others, the rate of growth is the dynamic of modern capitalism.”

The second rule is that the purpose of economic activity must be to maximize profit for nonhuman entities. The primary actors in the consumer economy are not people but corporations. Corporations are “fictitious persons,” having all the rights of individuals to own property and transact business. But corporations are not human; they don’t suffer and bleed, they don’t have consciences or souls, they don’t go to jail. They are legal fictions. Nevertheless they act as if they were individuals, individuals possessing immense wealth and power – and tunnel vision. A corporation is governed by a “fiduciary duty,” which requires that every act must have the aim of maximizing profit. Stop, halt, end of story. So by law, ethics and moral responsibility are irrelevant in matters of corporate policy. Profit is all that matters. The corporation is mechanical, a simplistic construct without a human capacity for nuanced choice. Think of a ratchet and pawl or a conveyor belt – the degrees of freedom within the system are few, relative to the complexity of the living world.

The imperatives for growth and profit drive the behavior of the whole system. Like a machine, the economy has all the awesome power of mechanism but also its inhuman indifference to consequence. The machine isn’t evil, any more than a shovel or a hammer is evil, but it is complex enough to have its own agenda, which is not a human agenda. Because it’s inhuman and because it has amassed so much power, it is, in mythic terms, the Juggernaut, beyond control, growing ever more vast and more destructive.

The machine has a reflexive quality that gives it power over mind and soul. This artifact, our creation, acts on us and changes us. To fulfill its simple imperatives for growth and profit, the machine must create insatiable desire. It must cause us to want more than we need, more than we’ve ever wanted before, and it must continue to do this forever in order to grow and generate profit. As a result, the machine, through its human agents, exerts an enormous influence on our individual thoughts and beliefs. We are constantly subject to a bedlam of manipulation, slogans and images, tales and fancies whose only objective is to stimulate desire. As years pass we bend to the constant barrage; we become “consumers,” assuming our place in the machine, performing our industrial function.

The influence of the machine is responsible for much of the psychic pain and dysfunction we encounter. Logic and reason have little effect on how it operates. To change our minds and hearts, the machine appeals to the worst aspects of human nature. Greed, pride, fear, sloth, lust – the deadly sins – are the openings, the doors to demand for more products. The machine exaggerates the normal human tendency toward materialism. It encourages narcissism and self-indulgence. It displaces and subtly discredits healthy human attributes and practices such as compassion and thrift. This influence is more than sufficient to account for the malaise in society, in the same way that the physical effects of the machine’s operation are sufficient to explain the destruction of the natural world.

Ecology derives from adaptation. An ecology is an interrelated community of organisms that have adapted together to life in a specific habitat. The nature of adaptation affects the success of an ecology, whether in a specific place or on the whole planet. The psychology of ecology, or ecopsychology, should study and understand the nature and effects of our adaptation to the machine. The consumer-industrial economy is the elephant in the human living room – omnipresent, almost omnipotent, yet almost invisible because it’s simply taken for granted. Yet it affects the whole physical environment and the psychic environment as well, from spirituality and ethics to therapeutic practice. This is the frontier of psychology, the place for inquiry that will yield the deepest insights.

An example of the utility of this idea of the machine can be found in its implications for therapeutic practice. Counseling professionals are used to considering their clients as individuals or families, often without regard for the larger human-generated and natural contexts in which they are embedded. But considering the nature of the machine and the way it affects us, it seems inevitable that there are deleterious effects on psychological health and that those effects are most marked on the weakest and most disordered individuals. We often ask how much of the dysfunction we observe is due to past life experience alone or to endogenous causes. But it may be equally important to consider how much mental and emotional disturbance is in fact the product of living in an alien environment – of stress, anxiety, time pressure and the relentless pressure to have and to earn, to “succeed,” which are the bedrock realities of life within the industrial machine. It may be impossible to parse this question, to determine what caused what, but it seems certain that whatever problems clients present must to some degree be caused or exacerbated by our present specific context, by the circumstance of being embedded in a world that is ruled by an inhuman and unnatural logic.

The whole of ecopsychology is connected to context in a similar fashion. Every discipline – therapy, psychological theory, spirituality, ethics – and every human concern is in play with the machine. The Juggernaut is pervasive, comprehensive, inescapable and definitive. Its fate is our own. It is present on the freeway, in the airport, at the mall. To live with eyes open to this objective reality can be terrifying, but it’s necessary to understanding most of the things we care about.

To confront this overwhelming reality with open eyes is to glimpse the apocalypse. No wonder we behave blindly and maladaptively, when the alternative is to watch the mythic force of the machine bearing down on us. But psychologists, especially therapists, are familiar with the challenges of living with bad situations, and we know that it’s possible to live authentically and with some measure of pride and pleasure even when confronted with the most difficult realities. And who’s to say that nothing can be done, that we’re helpless in the face of the Juggernaut? Our challenge in this time is to live with integrity, to face reality and to save and heal whatever we can.

Richard Bruce Anderson is a leader in the voluntary simplicity movement and a senior fellow at the sustainability think tank For the Future. The essay “Resisting the Juggernaut: The Wild Frontier of Ecopsychology,” copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Bruce Anderson is from Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, edited by Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist. Reprinted by permission of Sierra Club Books.

Tags: Adbusters, Glimpsing the Apocalypse, Richard Bruce Anderson, mythical era, economy, culture, mythology, economics, simplicity, ecology, ecopsychology

Time - The Art of Simplexity

Interesting article from Time on the issues humans have with simplicity and complexity.

The Art of Simplexity

By Jeffrey Kluger Thursday, Jun. 12, 2008

Illustration by Lou Beach for TIME -ENLARGE +

Two of the smartest people you'll ever meet are the guys who used to operate the M. Coy bookshop on Pine Street in Seattle. Business pressures recently forced them to shutter their shop, but for 20 years, they sold their books, and from the moment you walked into their store, they had you figured out. They noticed where your gaze would go; they noticed where you paused. They noticed what books you picked up and how long you lingered over them. They recalled earlier customers who had bought the same titles and remembered other books those shoppers bought. They flashed through their entire 20,000-book inventory and then approached you with the single most important thing they had to offer: a recommendation.

Across town, in the Art Deco headquarters of Amazon.com the booksellers are good at making recommendations too. Log on to their site, and you've walked into their store. There, Amazon computers also keep an eye on you. They see where you click; they see where you pause. They recall every book you've ever bought and what other customers like you have bought. They shovel through data about millions of buyers and tens of millions of sales and then, like the shopkeepers, come up with a suggestion. However, the computers don't do all this in a 1,400-g (3 lb.), walnut-wrinkled mass of brain tissue but in a vast network of computers. It's easy to say that one approach is more complex than the other. It's a lot harder to say which one.

Of all the things that confuse human beings, perhaps nothing trips us up so much as what it means for something to be simple or complex. A houseplant, with its microhydraulics, fine-tuned metabolism and dense schematic of nucleic acids, may be more complex than a manufacturing plant. A modern army, with its thicket of bureaucracy and static encampments, may be simpler than a nimble guerrilla group. A guppy, with its symphony of biological systems and subsystems, is vastly more complicated than a star.

Human beings are not wired to look at things this way. We're suckers for size, for flash, for speed, for scale; we mistake immensity for complexity and subtlety for simplicity. That has very often been our undoing. Shock and awe should win a war, until an insurgency beats it back. An election should be sealed by storming Super Tuesday, until the campaign dies of a thousand little losses. The 2003 Yankees, with their $180 million payroll, should win the World Series, until the $63 million Marlins send them packing.

These may be lessons most of us must repeat again and again, but science increasingly is learning something from them. A generation ago, the paradigm-shifting understanding of chaos theory revealed the power of disorder in meteorology, marketing, plate tectonics and more. Similarly, investigators across the social and scientific spectrums are today studying how systems that seem simple or complex may be just the opposite--and how that fact can expand our understanding of our world. "Ask me why I forgot my keys today, and the answer may be that something was on my mind," says neuroscientist Chris Wood of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico, a multidisciplinary think tank devoted to complexity theory. "Ask me about the calcium channels in my brain that drive remembering, and you're asking a much harder question."

There are a lot of ways the push-pull between simplicity and complexity is being explored and explained. Consider how babies learn to speak--a job so complicated that by some measures they shouldn't be able to do it at all. By the time babies are 18 months old, they have a core vocabulary of 50 words they can pronounce and 100 more they understand. By their sixth birthday, children have a working vocabulary of 6,000 words--meaning they've learned, on average, three new words every day since birth. Mastering conversational English requires about 50,000 words. What's more, since babies can't know where they'll be born, they must start life able to learn any of the world's nearly 7,000 tongues. It's processing speed that makes all this possible.

At Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., neuroscientist April Benasich fits prelingual babies with caps that read electrical activity in the brain. Benasich then plays one-syllable word bits to them--da and ta sounds, for example--and watches as their brains process the difference. At first, the sounds are separated by 300 milliseconds, very fast but well within the brain's ability. She then speeds things up so that the gap shrinks to 200 milliseconds, then 100, then 35--the point at which the length of the space is less than the length of the syllable itself. Even then the babies keep pace, getting all the way down to 10 milliseconds before the sounds run together.

Not all kids, however, have the same gifts. Benasich has found that some children fall out of the word-break race at about 70 milliseconds. Find the kids who later develop reading or speech disabilities, and they may also turn out to be the ones who had trouble keeping up with the sounds. "If you can't make a precise phonological map of a word," Benasich says, "you can't recognize it or reproduce it." If therapists could spot kids with such processing problems early, they could provide programs better targeted to their needs. No matter how the children's disability is corrected, it's a mark of the simple things on which speech stands or falls that the need for such retraining may turn on a few milliseconds of hearing either way.

Mundane matters like traffic move through simplicity choke points too. On any given day, about a million cars stream into and out of Manhattan. At any given moment, however, only about 8,000 of them are in operation in the heavily traveled midtown area. Keep those cars moving, and traffic flows smoothly all over the island. Jam them up, and gridlock can spread like ice freezing. "In fact," says urban-planning consultant Sam Schwartz, a former New York traffic commissioner who helped the city prepare for the 1980 transit strike, "in the case of true gridlock, the streets are actually 60% empty. All of the crowding is at the intersections, with nothing getting to midblock."

Tags: Psychology, brain, complexity, simplicity, Time, The Art of Simplexity, Jeffrey Kluger, decisions, chaos theory