Suffering as The Guru

Most people see suffering in a completely negative light. And this is not just on the physical level, but the spiritual level also. For example, the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are usually interpreted as a way to end suffering. In other words, there are no positive aspects to suffering.

I have a different take: I think suffering is one of the best impetuses for growth and learning. Here's a song my husband Arthur wrote about the value of suffering—he calls suffering "the guru."

Stop signs and stoplights are red because human perception is keenly attuned to the color red; our blood is colored red and our physical survival depends upon us being aware when we've hurt ourselves. Physical pain exists, at least in part, to draw our attention to the fact that we are ill or injured. Most of us resist physical pain; we reach for pills to make it go away; we see pain as an enemy. But when you look at it from the perspective of “suffering is the guru” you see that pain is our ally, it draws our attention to a problem that needs fixing. The pain is the motivator for us to stop a behavior that's hurting us, to go to the doctor, etc.

Problems of the mind don't have an obvious physical symptom like a bleeding wound or the pain of a burn. But the sufferings of ego-identity—pride, embarrassment, anxiety, regret, remorse, depression—are the analogues of physical pain. The suffering is pointing towards the problem, in the same way a pain in my mouth points to a problem with my gums/teeth and sends me to the dentist. The depression or anxiety is our ally, our teacher, our guru, pointing our attention to a sore in our mind that is in need of healing.

Don't Cure the Neurosis, Find the Right Job For It

I’m a weaver, and I belong to a weaver’s group that meets monthly. We regularly joke about how weaving is a good occupation for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder because it requires attention to detail and the ability to spend hours at a stretch doing repetitive tasks. For example, I’ve just finished a piece that had 1296 threads: first I had to measure out 9-yard lengths of yarn 1296 times, then each of those threads had to be threaded through the loom twice. And this was before I could start to weave! Often people ask me how I have the patience to do this—for pleasure—and I reply that I love to weave and this is just part of the process. But I can also see how I have the kind of personality that permits this type of detail work.

At our last meeting one of the weavers said, “Don’t cure the neurosis, find the right job for it!” This struck me as a profound insight, particularly for our society that is anxious to cure every slight deviation from some concept of “normal” that we’ve established. I’d just amend it to say, “or the right lifestyle.”

Twenty-five years ago I taught art at a private grade school. There was a boy with ADHD in first grade. This was the first time I had encountered someone with the diagnosis. His teacher was very wise; she let the boy sit on the floor and play with blocks during lessons while all the other students had to sit at their desks. By doing this, he could listen and attend to what she was saying, but if he’d been forced to sit at his desk he’d have been incapable of paying attention. What impressed me most of all was that she’d managed to explain it to the other kids so they were all okay with the setup. I loved this boy and had a great relationship with him; he was quite perceptive and intelligent.

What I learned from this experience was that maybe it’s incorrect to say there is something wrong with many of the children with ADHD. Maybe there’s something wrong with our cultural norms. Maybe the way school is structured is just not right for some children, for example. This perception has just been strengthened as ADHD has become an epidemic. How could there be something wrong with that many of our children?

Last week the New York Times published an article by Richard A. Friedman, “A Natural Fix for A.D.H.D.” Dr. Friedman is professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College. His article suggests that my perception may be true.

The United States Needs a New Story

This morning, as the Republicans are celebrating nationwide victories, taking control of the Senate and increasing their majority in the House, plus winning governor’s races in supposedly liberal states, I’m reminded of the widespread liberal delusion last year that the Republican Party was an almost-extinct dinosaur (see this blog post).

My impression is that the American people are deeply confused. They say they’re angry about a do-nothing Congress and then vote for the obstructionists. They say they hate government yet demand services when it’s in their interest—when a natural disaster hits a conservative part of the country there’s never a mention of refusing federal aid because it’s from that loathsome government.

The reason we’re confused is because we’ve lost any compelling story about who we are as a people. We used to have a thrilling story, one that made me proud to be an American when I was a child. We had thrown off a king and instituted a republic where we governed ourselves. We were the vanguard of human progress.

Of course there were plenty of issues with the original constitution: slavery and a limited electorate are the obvious examples. But as time went on and we continued on the path of democratization, we fixed those errors. We first expanded the electorate to all white men in the 1820s, ended slavery in 1865, women finally got the vote in 1920, and over the last fifty years we’ve been expanding civil rights.

But today we seem to be missing the awesomeness of what we have accomplished. We don’t understand the amazing advance in human social organization that democracy represents.  We are so spoiled by the relative ease of living and our deplorable lack of historical knowledge that we are unaware of not only the preciousness—and precariousness—of our democracy but the great struggles that were required to wrest control from tyrants. We take our democratic republic for granted. And that’s why we are in danger of losing it.

From Whining to Gratitude

This month I had a colonoscopy for the first time. I’d heard people talk about the pre-procedure cleaning, and how that was the hardest part. I read online about the drink that you take to empty your bowels, and how awful it tasted.

So I approached the cleansing day with some trepidation. My experience? It was easy. The drink tastes a little salty, that’s all, and if you’re prepared and spend the evening near a bathroom, the cleansing is a minor inconvenience, even funny if you take the right attitude.

The next day, while we were waiting for the doctor to come into the room, I told the nurse-anesthesiologist that, in my opinion, the cleansing experience was minor and that people were whiners. She replied “YES!!”

Afterwards I thought about it this way: modern science has developed a technology that can reduce the incidence of colon cancer (a very nasty and painful disease) to almost zero, and our part in the equation is to spend a few hours going to the toilet every fifteen minutes. But what part do most of us put our attention on? The small amount of discomfort. We whine about how much we suffered.

Because of my GLACHH (gratitude, love, acceptance, compassion, humility, honesty--see blog post) work, I was instead capable of putting my attention on the amazing gift to my health the colonoscopy represented. I could feel gratitude.

Everything is a mix of good and bad. In this dualistic world there is no free lunch, there is nothing that is all positive. In this country we have become so spoiled by the good life that we seem to be expecting life to have no down sides.

Genre-less Music

There’s something new happening in the world of acoustic music. Last weekend I went to see Noam Pikelny and Stuart Duncan—a duo of banjo and fiddle. When I first heard about the concert, I wondered how those two instruments could possibly make for an interesting evening of music. But recently I’ve been listening to a lot of music on YouTube with Chris Thile, Michael Daves, Brian Sutton, Noam Pikelny, and others, and these musicians are playing together in all sorts of combinations.

 

Chris Thile has been pushing the boundaries of musical categories for some years now, ever since he left Nickel Creek. You never know where he’ll turn up and what kind of music he’ll be playing; right now he’s touring with Edgar Meyer—that’s a duo of mandolin and acoustic bass. Their song, “Big Top” doesn’t fit any music genre I know—jazz bluegrass would be about the closest you could come to a category.  He’s also playing Bach sonatas on his mandolin. Maybe we’re almost to the point where we can throw the concept of genre out the window: it doesn’t matter any more what instrument you play, you can create music in any style you like or create a new one of your own. It feels so free and fresh. 

In the concert I heard, Mr. Pikelny and Mr. Duncan played bluegrass, but they also played a Scottish reel, Django Reinhardt-style swing, and some haunting waltzes of Mr. Pikelny's composition. The instrumentation was sensational; they are both masters on their instruments (Mr. Pikelny just won banjo player of the year from the International Bluegrass Music Association). Sometimes I shook my head in wonder at the amazing runs Mr. Pikelny did on his banjo. And there was something wonderful in just having the two instruments; instead of a band passing the solo lead from instrument to instrument while everyone else plays rhythm, there were a lot of times when both men were playing lead at the same time and it was marvelous.

Do yourself a favor and click on some of these links and start exploring this new world of music!

Update: Thanks to my friend Arthur for reminding me to say that both these men are also in bands: Mr. Pikelny is in the Punch Brothers and Mr. Duncan is in the Nashville Bluegrass Band.

Also, I did not watch the tour video I linked to above until after I wrote this post. When I did watch it (linked again here), it was interesting that the men brought up two points I’d mentioned.

1. could these two instruments fill an evening?
2. with only two instruments there’s “no place to hide.” No playing background rhythm.

Another feature of this music is that the musicians often share a single microphone, creating an acoustic, “living room” feel. Instead of having separate microphones and listening to a tailored mix through earbuds (each person has a mix with their instrument/voice a little higher), these musicians are listening to each other acoustically. This creates a realness that is lost in all the electronics. Mr. Pikelny and Duncan had individual mics, but there were no floor monitors or earpieces.

Another group that plays this way sometimes is the Milkcarton Kids. When I saw them earlier this year they used only one microphone, and faced each other. It was as if we in the audience were sharing an intimate musical experience that the two men were creating together. Exquisite. 

Ebola Demonstrates the Need for a World Government

Last week Ebola made it to the United States. It was only a matter of time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts a “worst-case scenario” of 1.4 million cases (worldwide total) by early 2015.

Other Ebola outbreaks have happened in rural villages and were relatively easy to contain. But this day was inexorably coming when an outbreak would spread into urban areas, making it much more difficult to contain. So why wasn’t there a UN plan in place for exactly this kind of situation, with mobile hospitals and protective suits ready to deploy? There doesn’t seem to have been any contingency plans ready to handle a health emergency of this scope. So far most of the foreign aid workers are nonprofit groups like Doctors without Borders, and these people must be getting exhausted. The U.S. is deploying 3000 troops to Liberia, but this effort will take weeks or months before making any difference.

In my mind this event has exposed the fundamental weakness of our current global governing systems. The world is interconnected now. More and more problems are global. We can’t say any longer that, for example, this Ebola outbreak is just West Africa’s problem. It’s our problem too. One person gets on a plane and the virus is here.

And Ebola is just one example. Climate change is another. Syria is another. Allowing the Syrian civil war to fester allowed ISIS to gain power.

My husband tells a great fable: Imagine a rubber lifeboat, afloat in the middle of a vast ocean. The boat is filled with passengers, each one representing a nation of Earth. The boat’s rule is that each passenger has the sovereign right to do whatever he/she likes in his/her seat. If a passenger wants to take out an ice pick and start poking holes in the boat, that’s her right. But everyone in the boat—that’s all of us—will go down together.

 We live on a small planet in a sea of darkness. We better learn to start thinking of ourselves as the same people, as citizens not of the United States or of Liberia but as citizens of Earth, recognizing that my interests are yours and vice versa. If I hurt you I hurt myself. We’re that connected now.

It’s time we developed a global governing system with true power. The UN was a good beginning, but it was deliberately made weak so it couldn’t interfere with the business of most nation-states. We need a real world government.

Ignorance of Income Inequality is Damaging to our Society

Three years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement got America’s attention with the cry of “We are the 99%.” Income inequality was put under a spotlight for a time. But how far did the understanding penetrate? Unfortunately, not very far.  

First, in a recent poll the average American thought CEOs made 30 times the wage of their employees, which hasn’t been true for 50 years. Today the figure is ten times as much—over 300 times.

Second, most people are completely unaware of the extent of wealth inequality, which is much worse than income inequality.  The wealthiest 20% in the U.S. own about 84% of the wealth. Think about that for a moment: only 16% of wealth is left for over three-quarters of the population. When you get to the bottom half of the population, those 155 million people own only about 2% of the total wealth.

To see an illustration of the income and wealth inequality in the United States, watch this episode of a TV show I did with Arthur Hancock in 2010.

The chart above, created by Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College, vividly shows one of the contributors to the rise of income inequality in the last few decades. The graph portrays the distribution of national income growth during economic expansions since WWII. The blue represents the bottom 90%, the red the top 10%. In the last thirty years all the gains have gone to the wealthy, in fact, in the latest expansion most Americans have been losers—the truth is most of us don’t even realize we’re in an expansion, the Great Recession hasn’t ended for us yet.

In a recent column, “Invisible Rich,” Paul Krugman asks:

So how can people be unaware of this development [massive income inequality], or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds…

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate…

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

And the wealthy, in control of the media and the government, have a vested interest in keeping us ignorant.