@Google Presents: John Merrow, "The Influence of Teachers"

Good stuff - we really need to rethink how we educate our children. It's not enough any more to know facts and data. In the rapidly evolving world it has become crucial that people know how to think and ask questions, not simply know the answers.

John Merrow is the author of, as you might have guessed, The Influence of Teachers: Reflections on Teaching and Leadership.




@Google Presents: John Merrow, "The Influence of Teachers"

How can schools and teachers change to keep up with the current educational landscape, a world in which young people must learn how to ask the right questions, not merely parrot back the 'right' answers? In this urgent and insightful book, John Merrow draws on his experience as a reporter for PBS and NPR to examine this question and others, and offer possibilities and solutions for a new education system. Told through warm storytelling and compelling case studies, Merrow paints a vibrant and inspiring picture of why and how we must transform - not reform - our schools.

I enjoyed this book, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives, when I read it a while back - this is a good lecture.

Shankar Vedantam: The Hidden Brain

Washington Post columnist Shankar Vedantam discusses his book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives.

The hidden brain is Vedantam's shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside of our conscious awareness, but that have a decisive effect on how we behave. The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all of our most complex and important decisions—it decides who we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, or which way to run when someone yells "fire!"

Vedantam, longtime author of the Washington Post's popular "Department of Human Behavior" column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences. Using original reporting that combines the latest scientific research with narratives that take readers from the American campaign trail to terrorist indoctrination camps, Vedantam illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an argument about how we can compensate for our blind spots—and what happens when we don't.

Dalai Lama - The Perfection of Wisdom

ESSENCE OF THE HEART SUTRA:
The Dalai Lama's
Heart of Wisdom Teachings
by H.H. the Dalai Lama
trans. & ed. by Geshe Thupten Jinpa
more...

Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

"The mantra of the perfection of wisdom--the mantra of great knowledge, the unexcelled mantra, the mantra equal to the unequalled, the mantra that quells all suffering--is true because it is not deceptive."--The Heart Sutra

The perfection of wisdom is called "the mantra of great knowledge" because thoroughly understanding its meaning eliminates the three poisons of craving, hatred, and delusion. It is called the "unexcelled mantra" because there is no greater method than the perfection of wisdom for saving one from the extremes of cyclic existence and the isolated peace of individual nirvana. It is called the mantra "equal to the unequalled" because the Buddha's enlightened state is unequalled, and, through the deepest realization of this mantra, one attains a state equal to that state. Finally, the perfection of wisdom is known as the "mantra that quells all suffering" because it quells manifest sufferings and also removes all propensities for future suffering.

The perfection of wisdom is the ultimate truth, thus the statement "it is true." In the realm of the ultimate truth, there is no disparity, as there is in conventional reality, between appearance and reality, and thus this manifest ultimate truth is "not deceptive." This nondeceptiveness also suggests that, through actualization of this mantra, the perfection of wisdom can enable one to attain total freedom from suffering and its causes. From this perspective too, we can say that it is the truth.

"The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is proclaimed:
tadyatha gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha!
Shariputra, the bodhisattvas, the great beings, should train in the perfection of wisdom in this way."

--from Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama's Heart of Wisdom Teachings by H.H. the Dalai Lama, translated & edited by Geshe Thupten Jinpa

Essence of the Heart Sutra • Now at 2O% off!
(Good until December 23rd).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Predictability of Unpredictability

Interesting talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, at the RSA.

The Predictability of Unpredictability

1st Dec 2011; 18:00

Listen to the audio (full recording including audience Q&A)

Please right-click link and choose "Save Link As..." to download audio file onto your computer.

Download Nassim Taleb's presentation (pdf)

RSA Keynote

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the brilliant and controversial author of The Black Swan, described in the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War 2. He came to wider public attention as one of the few prominent academics to correctly warn of catastrophe in the financial system ahead of the credit crunch.

Despite his skills as economist and aphorist, it is Taleb’s theory of knowledge which has made him required reading in 10 and 11 Downing Street. By emphasising the inherent uncertainty and complexity of reality he argues against top down planning and research arguing instead for small scale experimentation and observation. Cameron Conservatives quote Taleb in making the case against central state control and planning and in favour of localism and testing by doing.

Join renowned academic and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb as he discusses his groundbreaking ideas and their relevance to the current economic crisis, national policy making and other topics with Rohan Silva, senior policy advisor to the Prime Minister.

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA.

Tikkun - Zvi Bellin Recounts His Experience as Marc Gafni's Student in Israel

In my efforts to bring awareness to the integral community of the dangers Marc Gafni poses, I have often tried to include men in the discussion as well - the issue as I see it is not about sex, it is about power and control. The women who have related their stories to me have made this point, as well.

For the most part, however, the only visible victims (Gafni seriously dislikes the use of "victim" for the people he has used/abused because it automatically makes him a perpetrator, by definition, and he is seriously invested in not taking responsibility for what he does) have been the women he has slept with. Many others have also pointed out that men are abused as his students, as well, but this is the first time I have seen a personal statement by one of his former male students.

The fact that the article appears on the Tikkun website adds considerable weight to the account - Tikkun is one of the finest progressive Jewish magazines available.

In his article, Zvi Bellin does not mention Gafni by name - he is referred to as "the Rabbi" and in one section Bellin discusses the emphasis Gafni placed on Lashon Harah (Speaking about Others) as something that must never happen in his community. Essentially, Gafni demanded a vow of silence as a way to prevent the members of the community from discovering his actions. It's significant that all these years later, Bellin still does not name Gafni directly.

I have no issue with naming Gafni as the subject of the article, nor does one of the commentors.

It's a pretty long article and I really want readers to go there and read all of it, so I am only posting a snippet from the beginning and some pieces of the more important passages.

[UPDATE - The old link does not work - I have no doubt Gafni pressured Tikkun to remove it. Bellin put the article online at this link.]

“Asseh Lecha Rav”: A Journey Through Clergy Abuse

by: Zvi Bellin on December 13th, 2011 

Several years ago I thought I met the Rabbi of my dreams. He identified as Orthodox and also purported a deep spiritual life. He appeared warm and accepting and he seemed to understand my struggle to figure out how I can blend Judaism with the needs of my personal spirituality. 

And here are a few of the key passages:

I was loved and supported by this community. I grew in my ability to have presence in a group and to be a community facilitator. While my relationship with the community members was nurturing, I began to have serious doubts about my Rabbi’s behavior. 

First there was the emphasis on secrecy in the community. The Rabbi taught that as a spiritual community we should restrain from Lashon Harah (Speaking about Others). While this is a valuable ethic to have within any community, I later realized that the Rabbi used this teaching to ultimately discourage members of the community to talk about their relationship with him. The degree of secrecy felt like a dark shroud, where I was cautious to share valid concerns fearing that he would find out. 

* * * * * * *

Second, the Rabbi always put his vision first, regardless of how this might impact the well-being of those around him. I was able to see now how the Rabbi used tactics of manipulation to coax people to work for him. Even if these relationships turned sour, the Rabbi seemed to be unrelenting. This involved bartering a community member’s technical services for a conversion to Judaism that would never come, and sustaining a toxic working relationship with a community member that involved frequent shouting matches. Additionally, the Rabbi showed no concern for his own well-being. He seemed to work constantly through the night, obsessively checking e-mail and working on publications. 

* * * * * * *

Related to this last point, the Rabbi seemed to try to usurp power from other community leaders by openly disrespecting them in front of their community members. For example, when an elderly Eastern meditation teacher came to our community center for a debate, the Rabbi made him wait more than a hour before greeting him. He was not necessarily doing anything of dire importance, simply working on emails and publications. When confronted by the teacher’s students about his behavior the Rabbi casually dismissed their concerns. On another similar occasion the Rabbi was angry that another community leader was given the same kind of chair that he sat on because it made them look like equals.

* * * * * * *

The last point of major concern for me was that the Rabbi’s past was littered with accusations of sexual misconduct. The Rabbi mostly denied that the stories were true and tried to discredit them by defaming the people that told these stories. On a few occasions, the Rabbi was unable to counter the claims and admitted to his wrong doings, though shifted the blame to the victim. He often talked about the danger of getting stuck in the role of victim. I now speculate that his rants against victimization was his way of minimizing the hurt he had caused other people.

* * * * * * *

Finally, the silence was broken and his sexual escapades were revealed. The Rabbi, facing legal charges, decided to flee to the United States.

There was much concern for the women that the Rabbi had hurt by the larger Jewish communities that supported him over the years. Their stories were documented and the Rabbi was banned from teaching in most of the Jewish world. Though I was not manipulated into having sex with the Rabbi, I experienced psychological manipulation and after-effects from my contact with the Rabbi. As I spent time away from the community, I slowly became aware that I was being controlled by my teacher. The Rabbi would read my e-mails and respond to them as if he were me. I learned to talk like him and think like him and took on his work ethic, working many days from 8am to midnight. I think it was my need for attention and love that was the tool he used to keep me engaged in his vision. And, of course the fact that I admired his deep teachings and stated relationship to Judaism. Towards the end of my term working with him, I increasingly second-guessed my own thoughts and concerns about him. I was not able to trust my own power of reason when it concluded that my hero was a dangerous person. I began to discredit my mind in order to stay in his favor and not to rock the boat of my own fantasy. Luckily, I had a conversation with a friend who broke through and gave me permission to listen to my gut and heart.

Gafni's seriously messed up behavior is documented here in ways I have not seen before, although many of us know that this is how he operates (as described by the female students whose stories have been given more importance). Manipulation and control are seriously detrimental to everyone, as Bellin describes here.

I hope all current and potential students of Gafni read this article and question their motivations for working with him and whether or not doing so is the best thing for their spiritual growth.

Athena H. Phillips: The Externalization of Trauma: A View of PTSD Symptoms as Healthy

In this recent post from GoodTherapy.org, Athena H. Phillips argues from a narrative psychotherapy stance that "externalizing" the trauma is a way to disidentify with the symptoms, to see it as an object of awareness rather than being the trauma. I would agree - if one can "wear" the symptoms rather the BE the symptoms, healing becomes much more possible.

The Externalization of Trauma: A View of PTSD Symptoms as Healthy

December 7th, 2011
By Athena H. Phillips, MSW, LCSW, Post Traumatic Stress / Trauma Topic Expert Contributor

Trauma symptoms are often experienced and viewed as invasive and malevolent.  Helplessness, hopelessness, confusion and a condemnation of self for their existence also appear thematic.  The initial layer of trauma treatment is frequently the unraveling of self-loathing for the expression of symptoms themselves; survivor and therapist collude in their endorsement of them as being inherently destructive and are to be eradicated.  A divergent perspective could be that symptoms are an expression of health versus illness.  Viewing the manifestation of PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) as having utility may offer an alternative understanding of the client’s presentation as offering direction to treatment, internal compassion, decreasing fear of symptoms and can foster a relationship between survivor, therapist and Trauma.  Additionally, the externalization and personification of Trauma may illuminate the individual functions of client presentation while offering precise direction for treatment.

In the embodiment of Trauma we view it as something that has characteristics and ways of being in the world that are consistent over time and place (and in this case it’s interaction with people).  Defining PTSD according the DSM IV is a means of detecting  its’ presence in the life of a survivor while establishing a foundation for this discussion. According to the DSM IV(American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders (4th ed). Washington DC: Author), diagnostic criteria include intrusive memories, thoughts, or dreams of an event, a sense of reliving it,  and intense distress in response to both internal and external cues that resemble an event(s).  Individuals may thus become avoidance of triggers or cues, increase isolation, may have a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop (a foreshortened future) and of being detached.  Sleep difficulties are common; mood labiality, and hyper vigilance are also common (American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders (4th ed). Washington DC: Author).

Drawing from the concepts of narrative therapy and the externalization of a problem (the person is not the problem the problem is the problem) allows us to develop a relationship with Trauma and to begin to evaluate its’motivations (Playful approaches to serious problems: Narrative therapy with children and their families. Freeman, Jennifer C.; Epston, David; Lobovits, Dean New York, NY, US: W W Norton & Co. (1997). xvii, 321 pp.).  Symptoms could be conceptualized as tools utilized by Trauma on our behalf in order to protect us, remind us of our core values, and to ensure that what happened before won’t happen again. It could be argued that the trauma response corresponds to the level of violation on self and values; a profoundly disturbing event calls for a profoundly disturbing response (from Trauma’s perspective).  Analogous to the concept of stuck points in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (Akin-Little, Angeleque (Ed); Little, Steven G. (Ed); Bray, Melissa A. (Ed); Kehle, Thomas J. (Ed), (2009). Behavioral interventions in schools: Evidence-based positive strategies, School Psychology (pp. 325-333). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association, xi, 350 pp.) flashbacks, dreams, invasive thoughts and triggers provide specific information about the violation the client’s event(s) infringed upon them.

Read the whole article.

Mind and Life XXIII - Session 4 - Environmental Ethics - What is at Stake?

Here is another installment in this years Mind and Life Conference, XXIII: "Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence," hosted by the Dalai Lama at office in Dharamsala, India, from October 17-21, 2011.

Dharma Tames the Coarse and Subtle Clinging to an Ego

MUSIC IN THE SKY: 

The Life, Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje

by Michele Martin

more...

Dharma Quote of the Week

The practice of Dharma is to pacify the afflictions and concepts that fill our minds. When we blend the teachings with our minds, the power of the Dharma can act upon and pacify afflictions and concepts. If on the outside we look like Dharma practitioners while on the inside our Dharma practice has not diminished our afflictions or concepts, we merely call ourselves practitioners without actually being one. This is not to say that outer behavior, our reflection in the world, is not important, but what is crucial is to train in taming our minds.

What we tame are the three main afflictions: ignorance, attachment, and aversion. Ignorance, the root of the two others, is defined as the continual fixation on our self that we assume to be permanent and independent. This ego-clinging is the main cause for our cycling in samsara. We wish to be in paradise for our own advantage; we wish to erase all suffering for our own advantage. We cling to this "I" of ours, thinking that it is so special that we should not be bothered with problems but enjoy wealth, power, and charisma. If we honestly look into our minds, it is quite easy to see this kind of coarse and obvious grasping to a self.

There are also subtle forms of fixating on the self ("I") and what belongs to it ("mine"), like the quick thought of ourselves before another one comes. When practicing Dharma, we are taming this coarse and subtle clinging to an ego. If this does not happen, we will merely be able to suppress the afflictions temporarily, distancing ourselves for the time being. To cut through them completely, we must steadily apply ourselves to practice. (p.187)

--from Music in the Sky: The Life, Art and Teachings of the Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje by Michele Martin, published by Snow Lion Publications

Music in the Sky • Now at 5O% off!

(Good until December 23rd).

Gingrich Tax Plan - Gift to the 1%, Explodes the Deficit

Think Progress lays out the damage that Gingrich's tax plan would do the federal budget - and the huge gift that it is to the 600,000 households making more than $1 million a year in income.

In an era with the greatest wealth disparity between rich and poor America has ever seen, Gingrich wants to make the gap even wider. As much as I am annoyed, frustrated, and disappointed with Obama, our country cannot withstand the class warfare that someone like Gingrich would bring tro the office of the President.

CHARTS: The 10 Craziest Facts About Newt Gingrich’s Tax Plan

By Pat Garofalo on Dec 15, 2011

2012 GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich — who has surged to the front of the polls — released a tax plan that calls for an optional 15 percent personal income tax and the complete elimination of investment taxes. As we’ve been reporting, the plan would blow a huge hole in the federal budget, causing perpetual trillion dollar deficits even assuming that Gingrich was able to get spending down to new, completely unreasonable lows for the modern era.

Most of the cost of the plan goes to lavishing tax breaks on the very wealthiest Americans. In fact, half of the benefit of Gingrich’s plan goes to the richest one percent of Americans, giving them more in tax cuts than the other 99 percent combined. Millionaires would receive a tax cut of more than $600,000 every year compared to current law.

And those are hardly the only facts about Gingrich’s plan that are worth mentioning. Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden and Director of Fiscal Reform Seth Hanlon have put together ten charts highlighting the absurdity of Gingrich’s proposals.
Here are a couple:





See the rest of the charts here.

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience By Alva Noë

This is a cool article by Alva Noë from the New York Times philosophy column, The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

By Alva Noë

 

What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience.

“Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals.

Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything.

 

Leif Parsons

What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness.


The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. You are your brain. Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that we are that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.

 

Leif Parsons

What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, among other things). Importantly, to break with the Cartesian dogmas of contemporary neuroscience would not be to cave in and give up on a commitment to understanding ourselves as natural. It would be rather to rethink what a biologically adequate conception of our nature would be.

But there is a second obstacle to progress in neuroaesthetics. Neural approaches to art have not yet been able to find a way to bring art into focus in the laboratory. As mentioned, theorists in this field like to say that art is constrained by the laws of the brain. But in practice what this is usually taken to come down to is the humble fact that the brain constrains the experience of art because it constrains all experience. Visual artists, for example, don’t work with ultraviolet light, as Zeki reminds us, because we can’t see ultraviolet light. They do work with shape and form and color because we can see them.

 

Leif Parsons

Now it is doubtless correct that visual artists confine themselves to materials and effects that are, well, visible. And likewise, it seems right that our perception of works of art, like our perception of anything, depends on the nature of our perceptual capacities, capacities which, in their turn, are constrained by the brain.

But there is a problem with this: An account of how the brain constrains our ability to perceive has no greater claim to being an account of our ability to perceive art than it has to being an account of how we perceive sports, or how we perceive the man across from us on the subway. In works about neuroaesthetics, art is discussed in the prefaces and touted on the book jackets, but never really manages to show up in the body of the works themselves!

Some of us might wonder whether the relevant question is how we perceive works of art, anyway. What we ought to be asking is: Why do we value some works as art? Why do they move us? Why does art matter?  And here again, the closest neural scientists or psychologists come to saying anything about this kind of aesthetic evaluation is to say something about preference. But the class of things we like, or that we prefer as compared to other things, is much wider than the class of things we value as art. And the sorts of reasons we have for valuing one art work over another are not the same kind of reasons we would give for liking one person more than another, or one flavor more than another. And it is no help to appeal to beauty here. Beauty is both too wide and too narrow. Not all art works are beautiful (or pleasing for that matter, even if many are), and not everything we find beautiful (a person, say, or a sunset) is a work of art.

Again we find not that neuroaesthetics takes aim at our target and misses, but that it fails even to bring the target into focus.

Yet it’s early. Neuroaesthetics, like the neuroscience of consciousness itself, is still in its infancy. Is there any reason to doubt that progress will be made? Is there any principled reason to be skeptical that there can be a valuable study of art making use of the methods and tools of neuroscience? I think the answer to these questions must be yes, but not because there is no value in bringing art and empirical science into contact, and not because art does not reflect our human biology.

To begin to see this, consider: engagement with a work of art is a bit like engagement with another person in conversation; and a work of art itself can be usefully compared with a humorous gesture or a joke. Just as getting a joke requires sensitivity to a whole background context, to presuppositions and intended as well as unintended meanings, so “getting” a work of art requires an attunement to problems, questions, attitudes and expectations; it requires an engagement with the context in which the work of art has work to do. We might say that works of art pose questions and encountering a work of art meaningfully requires understanding the relevant questions and getting why they matter, or maybe even, why they don’t matter, or don’t matter any more, or why they would matter in one context but not another. In short, the work of art, whatever its local subject matter or specific concerns ― God, life, death, politics, the beautiful, art itself, perceptual consciousness ― and whatever its medium, is doing something like philosophical work.

One consequence of this is that it may belong to the very nature of art, as it belongs to the nature of philosophy, that there can be nothing like a settled, once-and-for-all account of what art is, just as there can be no all-purpose account of what happens when people communicate or when they laugh together. Art, even for those who make it and love it, is always a question, a problem for itself. What is art? The question must arise, but it allows no definitive answer.

For these reasons, neuroscience, which looks at events in the brains of individual people and can do no more than describe and analyze them, may just be the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art.

Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.

---

Alva Noë is a philosopher at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He is the author of “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness.” He is now writing a book on art and human nature. Noë writes a weekly column for NPR’s 13.7: Culture and Cosmos blog. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Shinzen Young: Spiritual Teachers' Behaviour: Feedback & Ethics

Important talk . . .




Spiritual Teachers' Behaviour: Feedback & Ethics

Shinzen talks about spiritual teachers whose behaviour has been flagrantly abusive and less than ethical. He talks about the larger context in which this happens, and suggests that regular contact with a more senior teacher is important. He goes on to say that a feedback loop regarding the teacher's behaviour be set up with students, family and all other people regarding how that teacher is carrying themselves in the world, and that this be established and maintained despite how much time and energy it consumes. Filmed in Nov. 2009 at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls.

TEDxOjaiWomen - Alana Sheeren - Owning Our Grief

 
The speaker in this TEDx talk is primarily relating a female perspective and experience, but the issue of owning and living with our grief is important for all of us.

On an unrelated note: I have seen several TEDx women conferences, but not a single one for men. That needs to change.

Alana Sheeren - Owning Our Grief

About this talk:
How does grief shape our lives? Does the way we experience it make a difference? Using personal stories, Alana opens up new ways of looking at grief and encourages us to stay open to its gifts and lessons.

Alana Sheeren believes in love, beauty and the transformative power of grief. After the stillbirth of her son she began writing about her personal journey into grief and whole-self healing. A Reiki Master with a MA degree in clinical and community psychology and a BFA in theater, Alana partners with women through the dance of grief, both individually and in healing retreats.

Time's Person of the Year: The Protester

Time magazine has named it's annual person of the year, and after the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, they have chosen The Protester as the Person of the Year for 2011.

The Protester

By Kurt Andersen Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011

"Mohammed suffered a lot. He worked hard. But when he set fire to himself, it wasn't about his scales being confiscated. It was about his dignity." —Mannoubia Bouazizi, Tunisia

Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix.

(See pictures of protesters around the world.)

"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

Prelude to the Revolutions
It began in Tunisia, where the dictator's power grabbing and high living crossed a line of shamelessness, and a commonplace bit of government callousness against an ordinary citizen — a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — became the final straw. Bouazizi lived in the charmless Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 125 miles south of Tunis. On a Friday morning almost exactly a year ago, he set out for work, selling produce from a cart. Police had hassled Bouazizi routinely for years, his family says, fining him, making him jump through bureaucratic hoops. On Dec. 17, 2010, a cop started giving him grief yet again. She confiscated his scale and allegedly slapped him. He walked straight to the provincial-capital building to complain and got no response. At the gate, he drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match.

(See pictures of Sidi Bouzid.)

"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.

"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."

In Egypt the incitements were a preposterously fraudulent 2010 national election and, as in Tunisia, a not uncommon act of unforgivable brutality by security agents. In the U.S., three acute and overlapping money crises — tanked economy, systemic financial recklessness, gigantic public debt — along with ongoing revelations of double dealing by banks, new state laws making certain public-employee-union demands illegal and the refusal of Congress to consider even slightly higher taxes on the very highest incomes mobilized Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters. In Russia it was the realization that another six (or 12) years of Vladimir Putin might not lead to greater prosperity and democratic normality.

In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.

The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."

In Egypt and Tunisia, I talked with revolutionaries who were M.B.A.s, physicians and filmmakers as well as the young daughters of a provincial olive picker and a supergeeky 29-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member carrying a Tigger notebook. The Occupy movement in the U.S. was set in motion by a couple of magazine editors — a 69-year-old Canadian, a 29-year-old African American — and a 50-year-old anthropologist, but airline pilots and grandmas and shop clerks and dishwashers have been part of the throngs.

Read more: There are many more pages in the story.