Integral Options Cafe

Monday, August 13, 2007

Gratitude 8/13/07

Some things I am grateful for today:

1) My friend Susie made a very cogent observation last night that helped me identify an exiled subpersonality -- my shamed teenager. This is a disowned self that I haven't really recognized before, and getting to know it won't be fun -- but it's a crucial bit of work that I need to do. I'm grateful for Susie's wisdom.

2) I was talking with one of my clients (who is 15 years younger than I am) and he had never heard of Nehi. When I was a wee tyke growing up in Southern Oregon, Blue Creme Nehi was my favorite soda. Until about mid-way through college, I could still find it in one small store in a little grocery store (more like a General Store) in Provost, Oregon. I'm grateful that I had the experience of Blue Nehi.

3) I had a great heart-and-lungs weight training session today. None of the exercises were tough weight wise, but they are designed to use as many muscles as possible to make weight training feel like cardio.

What are you grateful for today?

A Momentary Lapse In Concentration…

Found this at Howl @ the Moon -- made me laugh . . .

WIFE: What would you do if I died? Would you get married again?
HUSBAND: Definitely not!

WIFE: Why not - don’t you like being married?
HUSBAND: Of course I do.
WIFE: Then why wouldn’t you remarry?
HUSBAND: Okay, I’d get married again.
WIFE: You would? (with a hurtful look on her face).
HUSBAND: (makes audible groan).

WIFE: Would you live in our house?
HUSBAND: Sure, it’s a great house.
WIFE: Would you sleep with her in our bed?
HUSBAND: Where else would we sleep?
WIFE: Would you let her drive my car?
HUSBAND: Probably, it is almost new
WIFE: Would you replace my pictures with hers?
HUSBAND: That would seem like the proper thing to do.

WIFE: Would she use my golf clubs?
HUSBAND: No, she’s left-handed.
WIFE: - - silence - -
HUSBAND: Fuck!!

The Hubble Deep Field Video with Narration

Aside from one annoying insert (though there is a point to it) at the 4:20 mark or so, this is an excellent video.

Via: VideoSift

Daily Dharma: With This Stranger On Our Own

[Distractions]

Today's Daily Dharma from Tricycle:

With This Stranger On Our Own

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity--but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards. . . It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

~ Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Daily Om: Sitting With Feelings

[image source]

Today brings another good Daily Om -- a reminder that if we can't learn to be with our feelings, they will find a way to be with us whether we want them or not.

As The Earth Allows The Rain
Sitting With Feelings

It can take great courage to really sit with our feelings, allowing ourselves to surrender to their powerful energies. All too often we set our feelings aside, thinking we will deal with them later. If we don’t deal with them, we end up storing them in our minds and bodies and this is when anxiety and other health issues can arise. Denying what our bodies want to feel can lead to trouble now or down the line, which is why being in the thick of our feelings, no matter how scary it seems, is really the best thing we can do for ourselves.

One of the reasons we tend to hide or push aside our feelings is that we live in a culture that has not traditionally supported emotional awareness. However, as the connection between mind and body--our emotions and our physical health-- becomes clearer, awareness of the importance of feeling our feelings has grown. There are many books, classes, workshops and retreats that can help us on our way to emotional intelligence. We can also trust in our own ability to process what comes up when it comes up. If sadness arises, we can notice its presence and welcome it, noting where in our bodies we feel it, and allowing ourselves to express it through tears or a quiet turning inward.

When we simply allow ourselves to fully feel our feelings as they come, we tend to let them go easily. This is all we are required to do; our feelings simply want to be felt. We often complicate the situation by applying mental energy in the form of analysis, when all we really need is to allow, as the earth allows the rain to fall upon it. As the rain falls, the earth responds in a multitude of ways, sometimes emptying out to form a great canyon, sometimes soaking it up to nourish an infinitude of plants. In the same way, the deeper purpose of our feelings is to transform the terrain of our inner world, sometimes creating space for more feelings to flow, sometimes providing sustenance for growth. All we need to do is allow the process by relaxing, opening, and receiving the bounty of our emotions.

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Karl Rove, Adviser to President Bush, to Resign

From the Washington Post:

Rove, 56, who escaped indictment in the CIA leak case, has been under scrutiny by the new Democratic Congress for his role in the firings of U.S. attorneys and in a series of political briefings provided to various agencies across government. Citing executive privilege, he defied a subpoena and refused to show up for a congressional hearing just two weeks ago on the allegedly improper use by White House aides of Republican National Committee email accounts. Fellow Bush advisers have said they believe the congressional probes have been aimed in part at driving Rove out.
The White House said his departure was unrelated to the investigations. In an interview published this morning, Rove told Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul A. Gigot that he had been interested in leaving last year but did not want to go immediately after the Democrats took over Congress, nor did he want to abandon Bush as he fought for his troop buildup in Iraq and an immigration overhaul.
"I just think it's time," Rove told Gigot in comments confirmed by the White House. The Journal said White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten told Rove and other senior aides that if they stay past Labor Day, they would be expected to remain through the end of the second term, Jan. 20, 2009.
"There's always something that can keep you here," Rove said, "and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family."
Rove said he was finished with political consulting and plans to spend much of his time at his house in Ingram, Tex., with his wife, Darby, and near their son, who attends college in San Antonio. He said he plans to write a book about Bush's years in office, a project encouraged by the president, and would like to teach at some point, but has no job lined up for now. He does not plan to work on a presidential campaign nor would he endorse a candidate.

The "official reason" is never the real reason, so it will be interesting to see what happens next. He will probably be indicted on contempt charges in the next few months for refusing to appear before Congress, and this may be related to the legal battles he will face.

But I have a hard time accepting that the mastermind of a campaign to get an unqualified moron elected to the highest office in the land won't be working to put someone else in that seat.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Gratitude 8/12/07

Some things I am grateful for today:

1) The day started early with a walk in Sabino Canyon with my friend Susie. We had a nice conversation as we walked, but the best part was leaving the road and walking up Sabino Creek a little way to nice quiet spot, sitting on a quartz-inflected rock, and talking for a while. It was fun to walk in the water and feel the wetness on a very warm morning. More importantly, I am so very grateful for her friendship.

2) Tiger Woods won his 13th major and hid 4th PGA championship. It's nice to see history being made. He is truly the greatest golfer of his generation -- the records he sets may never be beaten.

3) My Seahawks looked good against the San Diego Chargers when the starters were playing. That bodes well for a good season this year, and hopefully a return to the Super Bowl.

What are you grateful for today?

Speedlinking 8/12/07

Quote of the day:

"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake."
~ E. M. Forster

Image of the day:

BODY
~ Why You Shouldn’t Use Lifting Gloves -- "I used lifting gloves during my first 6 months of strength training. I quit using them because I had to buy a new pair every 6 weeks. I didn’t understand back then why you shouldn’t use lifting gloves. I do now. Here’s why you shouldn’t use lifting gloves." Being single was a great reason for me to stop using gloves, and I'm glad I did (though I have to admit, if I had a girlfriend I'd be inclined to wear gloves again).
~ Drinking Milk After Exercise Encourages Muscle Gain And Fat Loss, Study Finds -- "Part of an ongoing study into the impact of drinking milk after heavy weightlifting has found that milk helps exercisers burn more fat.The study by researchers at McMaster University and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was conducted by the Department of Kinesiology's Exercise Metabolism Research Group, lead by Stuart Phillips."
~ Seniors Need More Protein Rich Food To Decrease Muscle Loss, Improve Quality Of Life -- "Scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have good news for people who want to stay strong in their old age: older bodies are just as good as young ones at turning protein-rich food into muscle.A newly published study suggests that a diet containing a moderate amount of protein-rich food such as beef, fish, pork, chicken, dairy or nuts may help slow the deterioration of elderly people's muscles."
~ More smoothies cutting the calories (AP) -- "Concerned about losing the calorie-conscious, smoothie makers are whipping up no-sugar and faux-sugar blends."
~ Fortify your diet with nature's heart healers -- "New plant compounds in these healthy, cholesterol-lowering foods slash your risk of heart disease by 20 percent. What to buy and how to eat them."
~ Does the desire to consume alcohol and tobacco come from our genetic makeup? -- "Alcohol and smoking can be harmful, if not deadly. While the desire for these substances can be due to environmental cues, genomic factors also play an important role. The etiology of these desires is multifactorial and a result of complex interactions with the environment. Adoption and twin studies have shown that the use of these substances is likely to be inherited. Such studies have provided evidence that one`s sex can influence the genetic factors for alcohol and tobacco use."

PSYCHE
~ A psychoanalyst for his age (but not ours) -- "Who killed Erik Erikson? Intellectually, he was once a king, ruling a sizeable empire, but now he's a dead commoner." Erikson might be dead to mainstream psychology, but he remains a critical therapist to those of us seeking an integral model.
~ Inside Intuition -- "Can you trust your gut instincts? A BBC Radio 4 documentary 'Inside Intuition' offers to address the issue. It's on this friday - that's the 17th August - at 11am. Those of you busy or outside of the UK, check the BBC's fantastic Listen Again pages during the week after broadcast."
~ Study Of Brain Blood Flow May Lead To Improved Depression Treatment -- "The usefulness of established molecular imaging/nuclear medicine approaches in identifying the 'hows' and 'whys' of brain dysfunction and its potential in providing immediately useful information in treating depression are emphasized in a study in the August Journal of Nuclear Medicine."
~ Highly Sensitive People -- "Characteristics of highly sensitive people are similar to introverted personality types. Like introverts, highly sensitive people are quickly drained and need time alone."
~ Can This Marriage Be Saved? -- "In a yearlong group exchange, a therapist and several troubled couples examine whether a crumbling union can be put back together again."
~ 5 Powerful Motivational Techniques To Help You Quit Smoking -- "Quitting smoking is an admirable goal. But you can be sure of running into some problems along the way. It is difficult to be persistent when everything you try seems to fail. And many people who don’t realize immediate results from their efforts are easily swayed toward giving up."

CULTURE/POLITICS
~ The Real Liberal: John Edwards is Third in the Polls, But Don't Count Him Out -- "If he weren't rich, handsome and so well married, you might feel a little sorry for John Edwards. Never before in the 231-year history of our republic have the inalienable traits that Edwards possesses -- his fair skin and a Y chromosome -- been anything but a prerequisite for presidential politics. Today, his race and gender stand a chance of derailing his campaign altogether."
~ How a U.S. Credit Crunch Went Global -- "Problems in the mortgage market have had a ripple effect, and the actions by European banks have spooked the markets."
~ Why We Loved Merv Griffin -- "Appreciation: Carson was the cool arbiter of taste. Griffin was your enthusiastic showbiz uncle, who gave an early TV break to some groundbreaking talent."
~ On Language: Cleavage Umbrage -- "The last time the word got this much publicity was more than a half-century ago, in television’s infancy, when the actress and interviewer Faye Emerson unabashedly — and to many viewers, shockingly — broke the buttoned-up dress code of decorum then prevalent. I profiled Faye and her husband, Skitch Henderson, back then for Esquire; she knew that her low neckline led to high ratings."
~ Tiger wins PGA Championship by 2 shots (AP) -- "A season of first-time major winners ended with a familiar champion — Tiger Woods, who seems to win them all. Challenged only briefly Sunday along the back nine of steamy Southern Hills, Woods captured the PGA Championship to win at least one major for the third straight season and run his career total to 13 as he moves closer to the standard set by Jack Nicklaus."
~ What Iowa's Straw Poll Tells the G.O.P. -- "Romney's win was no surprise, but who knew Mike Huckabee was a contender in the Republican presidential race?"

HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ Scientists try new ways to predict climate risks -- "Scientists are trying to improve predictions about the impact of global warming this century by pooling estimates about the risk of floods or desertification."
~ Race Is on to Detect Dark Matter -- "In deep underground laboratories around the globe, a high-tech race is on to spot dark matter, the invisible cosmic glue that's believed to keep galaxies from spinning apart."
~ Google Key to Latest ITunes Challenge -- "Add gBox Inc. to the growing list of online music services hoping to chip away at iTunes's dominance."
~ Scientist's Arrest Stirs Concern -- "Dutch scientist Marc van Roosmalen's success at combing the Amazon for new monkey species has earned him international acclaim and recognition as one of the world's leading biologists. Time magazine named him one of its 'Heroes for the Planet.'"
~ The most moving environmental story of the year -- "Newsweek's Sharon Begley and Scott Johnson should get the Pulitzer Prize for last week's Newsweek cover story, "Slaughter in the Jungle." It was the most moving story of the year and clearly based on truly intrepid reportage. More importantly, I hope it provokes action to stop this brutal global slaughter of wildlife." This story is heart-breaking.
~ Sea turtles make comeback on Texas coast -- "Turtle patrols on the beaches around Galveston, Texas, are tracking what appears to be a comeback of the Kemp's ridley sea turtle."
~ US Slipping in Life Expectancy Rankings -- "Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries."
~ Market Meltdown: Understanding Climate Economics -- "The market's real failure is that it allows for no signal from the future to the present, either from the conditions that will exist 30 years hence or from the people who will be alive and working then. The question becomes: Can we really create a market in which those far-off voices are effectively heard?"

INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ Why This Universe? [Stranger Fruit] -- "Jim Lippard has highlighted an article in the latest Skeptic which provides a taxonomy (below) of answers to why this universe is the way it is. Jim neglected to mention that the article is freely available online as a PDF."
~ Rocky Mountain Lotus Pond -- "Nestled in between a back country road and a sparse cluster of cabins lies a graceful lotus pond high in the town of Estes Park, CO, USA at the mouth of Rocky Mountain National Park. This humble little pool of brackish water with lazy koi fish is dwarfed by the giant, jagged cirque of mountains that tower over and surround it--yet its profound beauty can not be denied. These are pictures that I took upon visiting this quaint, sacred pond community this afternoon."
~ Is Religion Necessary? -- "Please talk a little about the threshold between meditation as mind-training practice and meditation as religious practice. At what point, if any, does it become desirable or necessary to step beyond the not-exclusively religious benefits of focus, concentration and mindfulness and into commitment to religion?"
~ Your Personal Meditation Guide; The Five Faculties -- "The Buddha spoke of The Five Faculties as trackable mental factors to aid in liberation. These qualities can be developed, tracked and, tuned to your meditation practice...."
~ Integral improvisation -- "Reading "Integral Arts Praxis" by James Wagner, it strikes me that the improvisational drama coaching method he describes is applicable to a variety of life situations, including a few that I am currently wrestling with."
~ Defense and fear -- "The more I explore beliefs, the clearer the basic pattern and dynamics become…"

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

This review is from the New York Times Book Review. The First Word sounds like a book I will have to get. I have long been interested in the origins of language, from Chomsky's dismissal of ever being able to know how language developed because it is hard-wired into our brains, to some of the theorists who suggest language skills developed in the same region of the brain responsible for throwing a spear at an animal or gesturing with with hands.

From what I can tell in this review, Christine Kenneally seems to look at the current state of language studies in a fairly comprehensive way.

In this field, physical evidence is scarce — language, except in its written form, leaves no trace — and scholarly clout depends on a capacity for ingenious inference and supposition. Christine Kenneally, a linguistics Ph.D. turned journalist, shrewdly begins “The First Word,” her account of this new science, with candid portraits of several of its most influential figures. Appropriately, the first chapter is devoted to Noam Chomsky, whose ideas have dominated linguistics since the late 1950s, and who, as Kenneally reports, has been hailed as a genius on a par with Einstein and disparaged as the leader of a “cult” with “evil side effects.”
According to Chomsky, humans are born with the principles of grammar hard-wired in their brains, enabling them, from an early age and without formal instruction, to construct an infinite variety of sentences from a finite number of words. Moreover, Chomsky has suggested, language is a peculiarly human phenomenon, a trait so remarkable that evolutionary theory is virtually helpless to explain it. “It surely cannot be assumed that every trait is specifically selected,” he wrote in 1988. “In the case of such systems as language ... it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them.” Chomsky’s impatience with the question of language’s origins effectively squelched inquiry into the subject for decades. (In a sense, Kenneally notes, such considerations had been taboo for much longer: although Darwin noted similarities between human speech and sounds made by monkeys and birds, and speculated that language “has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps,” by the mid-1870s the linguistic societies of Paris and London had formally banned all discussion of evolution.)
Lately, however, Chomsky’s grip on the field has loosened, thanks to half a dozen or so determined upstarts, among them his former student Philip Lieberman, who has mined the human brain for evidence that language evolved from organs, like the basal ganglia, that we share with many other species; the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who taught a bonobo named Kanzi the comprehension skills of a toddler; and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, an early champion of the notion that Chomskyan theory is compatible with Darwinian axioms.
In 1989, Pinker and a graduate student named Paul Bloom wrote a paper in which they argued that “language is no different from other complex abilities, such as echolocation or stereopsis,” and that “the only way to explain the origin of such abilities is through the theory of natural selection.” Just as the eye — an organ of breathtaking complexity and specialization — evolved incrementally through the combined effects of random mutations and natural selection over millions of years, so, too, Pinker and Bloom insisted, did language. The authors were invited to present their paper at M.I.T., where Pinker was then a professor, and they learned that Chomsky had agreed to serve as a commentator. Kenneally quotes Bloom on his reaction to this news: “I was absolutely terrified. ... Chomsky is utterly merciless in debate.”
In the end, Chomsky failed to show (apparently he had back trouble), and Pinker and Bloom went on to publish their paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a leading scientific journal, where it appeared along with comments from 31 scientists, including one who titled his endorsement “Liberation!” “From that point on,” Kenneally writes, “more and more researchers felt that studying the origin and evolution of language was a legitimate academic inquiry.”
Liberation has frequently taken a creative form. Lieberman compared the language and motor skills of Parkinson’s patients with those of climbers on Mount Everest. Both groups suffered damage to their basal ganglia: in the first case because of disease, in the second because of oxygen deprivation. Lieberman discovered that the higher the climbers went, the more difficulty they had forming speech — a complicated motor skill — and understanding sentences.One climber displayed such alarming deficits that Lieberman’s research team, which was monitoring the man by radio link, urged him to descend. He refused and several days later fell to his death. It turned out that the man had failed to properly attach his safety harness. The conclusion Lieberman drew from his study — that the basal ganglia, which in animals regulate motor skills, are also crucial for controlling human speech and thought — suggests how such an accident might have occurred. As Kenneally puts it: “It appears that the lack of oxygen supply to the basal ganglia affected the climber’s ability to follow the basic sequence of clipping and unclipping.”

Read the whole review.

Evanescence - Lithium

Cool song and video.

Via: VideoSift

Daily Dharma: Every Single Day

[image source]

Today's Daily Dharma from Tricycle is a good reminder that we should cherish everyday as though it may be our last -- we never know when it might be that final day.

Every Single Day

The Buddha recommended that every person should remember every single day that we are not here for ever. It is a guest performance, which can be finished any time. We don't know when; we have no idea. We always think that we may have seventy-five or eighty years, but who knows? If we remember our vulnerability every single day, our lives will be imbued with the understanding that each moment counts and we will not be so concerned with the future. Now is the time to grow on the spiritual path. If we remember that, we will also have a different relationship to the people around us. They too can die at any moment, and we certainly wouldn't like that to happen at a time when we are not loving towards them. When we remember that, our practice connects to this moment and meditation improves because there is urgency behind it. We need to act now. We can only watch this one breath, not the next one.

~ Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies

Life Beneath the Arctic Ice

From National Geographic:

Experience the seemingly space-like atmosphere under the ice in the depths of the Arctic. (Webby award winner- Best Experimental Online Video, 2007, and Webby Peoples Choice award winner - Best Experimental Online Video, 2007)

Via: VideoSift

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Monday, August 13, 2007

Sunday, August 12, 2007